NATURRRRR

Mining landscape on paper, 30 unique silkscreen prints, 70 × 48 cm each, 2025.

The cycle “Naturrrrr” explores the emergence of a human-made nature. Metals have been mined at Río Tinto in Andalusia for more than five thousand years. In one of the world’s oldest continuously exploited mining regions, Tartessians, Iberians, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths, Moors, and, more recently, multinational corporations have all left their traces. Between open pits and slag heaps flows the Río Tinto, its water stained copper-red, highly acidic, and largely inhospitable to most forms of plant and animal life. Over millennia, these conditions have become a new normality: a “nature” in which mining machinery, chemical transformations, and histories accumulated in geological sediments have become inseparably entangled. The silkscreen prints were produced using earth pigments collected from the Río Tinto mining landscape. I excavated the material on site, ground it into fine particles, and processed it into screen-printing ink. In the resulting works, the landscape is not represented but physically transferred onto the paper. Printed without an image motif, using an open screen, the material properties of the different soil samples unfold through the painterly gestures of the printing process. What emerges is a kind of primordial landscape of the Anthropocene—Naturrrrr—on paper.