Mittwoch, 15. 09.2021, 19:30 Uhr
Der Talk findet im Studio der Künstlerin statt. Um Anmeldung wird gebeten.
Michelle-Marie Letelier was born in 1977 in Rancagua, Chile. She currently lives and works in Berlin.
Her multimedia installations, photographs, videos, drawings and objects embrace orchestrated transformations of natural resources, alongside extensive wide-ranging, interdisciplinary research into the landscapes where their exploitation and speculation take place. Through her work, she places together different epochs, regions and societies, examining political-economic, historical and cultural aspects.
Michelle-Marie Letelier spent her early life in Chuquicamata, a space of copper deposits in the middle of the Atacama Desert of mined since pre-Hispanic times, annexed by Chile in the Saltpetre War (1879-84), and home to the largest copper mine in the world. When the town was to be buried due to new mining policies, Letelier returned to document this process—a pivotal moment that ushered in her practice.
Since establishing in Berlin in 2007, she has been particularly invested in examining five resources: coal, copper, saltpetre, wind and, more recently, salmon, in order to create a poetic work applying their properties - such as electrical conductivity, crystallisation and agency. In her practice, she experiments with chemical and physical transformation processes that produce the artworks themselves, as well as their poiesis, beyond the extractive industry and its forms of control.
The work of Michelle-Marie Letelier carries heavy socio-political overtones; it is eloquently reflective especially in times of unveiled globalisation, the increasing scarcity of raw materials and the crisis of the neoliberal model.
