In 2015, the same year you produced Infinite Yield one of the two tapestries exhibited in Temporary Atlas, you traveled to Namibia to visit Tsumeb copper mines. You recount that when you arrived you found: “A gaping hole in the ground, surrounded by dilapidated buildings and a field full of contaminated ore refuse”. I guess this has inspired the aforesaid work. I wonder how, more in general, works your process of creation? You often start with a drawing but what are the sources of inspiration?

The way I start my work is not very linear, there are many triggers like, for example, the places I visited, like Namibia as you said, there are emotions and thoughts, there are things linked with material I encountered, and over time the combination of thoughts, places, emotions, and the material bring me to making it into an artwork. It is not one single approach but a combination of many approaches, and also things linked to stories that happened at a specific time, and all that makes it possible for the work to exist. It is difficult to pick just one thing because it is always an entanglement of multiple parts.

Using caves as monuments is a powerful metaphor and a beautiful proposal of yours to shift our conception and valuation of the environment we live in. It is an idea more indebted to readymades than that of land artists perhaps since it seems that what we need to see is already there, you just need to shift your view. Is your art (also) aiming at this shift eventually?

I do not see a separation between the readymade and the material produced by the land, those holes are very much connected to that relationship with the land, the landscape, and the material that forms our environment. For me, the idea, more than shifting views, is to connect things that have been separated over time, so the separation between land and us, my interest is to make connections so that we can understand that we are not separated from it but we exist because it exists.

Extraction and transformation are topics that appear in the second work displayed in the show, In Pursuit of Bling: The Discovery, where you represent the mineral mica. It is a map and a diagram, a sort of cartography merging stories and histories. Today we still witness forms of colonialism like land grabbing and exploitation that cause desertification and pollution of African cities and landscapes, this also is mirrored in the bodies and psyche of those living there. How can art relieve all this, if it does relieve it in some way at all?

I would like to go back to the connection I said before, to connect that relationship of extraction from multiple places that we do not shed light on. Here in the west in the so-called developed countries, the use of material, such as mica, for example, has created a sort of emptiness in other places. Colonization is not only linked to those places,, we only talk about the one side afflicted and the side going through the trauma but we speak less about the power that infuses and inflicts this kind of violence and trauma. I think an artwork can show the interconnection of both sides, one that inflicts and one that is inflicted, be it by States or corporations. Art is able to open up ways of looking at and sometimes also able to create structures that allow for other ways of existence, to be connected and aware of relationships, art makes it possible to open up ways to look at the world and the way we live in it. So the notion of extraction is not only linked to Africa, but also in Europe, there are many cases of extraction and pollution, but we only tend to talk about Africa as a reference for things that are not working. This narration is skewed.

You said words have great importance for your artistic practice because with them you can play freely, break and rebuild them as you wish. How do words enter a practice like yours that is mostly visual-based?

I work a lot with poetry, quite a number of my work contains it. For example “Alterscapes”, as a word does not exist, so sometimes I make up words and sometimes I use broken English. This play with words is a way of thinking through language, also with the power of language and what it does, to create an imaginary through breaking a word. For example the word “fragilologist” I imagine there should be a science that studies fragility, but what does it mean to study fragility? So by putting certain words together or creating new words entirely, you can create a new imaginary, so for me what is interesting here is to touch more on the emotions, and by writing poetry you are able to tap into that space. I think with words you are able to play and to move from different ranges, to create ways of thinking to connect multiple fields of thinking within a single word. Nonetheless, the use of words is always interconnected with the artwork, whether it is the title, or is present visually, or it might be referenced indirectly; there are many ways in which the reflection of words can be in a work. It allows you to expand deeply on the work you are making through the language you have encountered while making the work; so it is not just limited to the title of the artwork, but also to how words and language influence its views and perception, and their ability to break words down and recreate a new form of language, not only textually but also in the way that the work is formed and created, it is in sum a translation into another dimension.