Edi Hirose’s Extractive Republic examines challenging realities of  his homeland, Peru—a country on the equatorial Pacific Coast of South America, best known in the United States for its pristine sites of impressive Incan ruins, majestic glaciers of the Andes, and the Amazon rainforest. Against this popular imagery of natural, unspoiled beauty, Hirose’s works give visibility to the processes that physically and often brutally reshape and alter the Peruvian land. They examine extractive industries—stone-quarrying and mining—that accomplish a proverbially miraculous feat: they literally move mountains. The artist exposes dramatic changes of the natural landscape stemming from human activities. Simultaneously, he also shows their far-reaching repercussions on the everyday, domestic scale by portraying lives and economies of the settlements that have grown around these enterprises, whether officially sanctioned or informal.

This exhibition counters received intuitions and deeply ingrained allegories. It seeks to render visible a simple, but profound material fact: every day, people move mountains. Entire mountaintops are erased and disappear from sight. Tons and tons of gravel and rock are removed and displaced from the rural hillsides: to extract precious metals, coal, and oil, or to produce concrete for new urban developments. Rivers and lakes are diverted and drained. Everyday human activities radically reshape seemingly stable, unchanging landscapes and with them, entire ecosystems.

Produced as a result of a long-term engagement with specific places such as rhyolite quarries on the outskirts of the city of Arequipa, the Andean silver-mining town of Cerro de Pasco, the rainforest of Madre de Dios, and his rapidly growing hometown of Lima, Hirose’s photographic series test the conventions of landscape photography. Challenging traditions of high visibility and spectacular, panoptical images, the artist renders visible blind spots produced by Peruvian developmentalist and technocratic agendas of the twentieth century. Hirose thus exposes the unseen and unsightly sites produced as a flipside of modern development and the supposed economic boom. Emphatically assuming the position of a walker—or, using Michel de Certeau’s term, a “user”—he examines these dramatic transformations from the perspective of an average human, who engages their surroundings tactically and often casually, making-do in the face of radical changes of topography, environment, and climate. Beneath the apparent environmental degradation, Hirose hints at the peripheral and liminal presences of subjects and experiences that upset triumphant narratives of prosperity and progress, and stubbornly refuse to disappear.  

Thus, this exhibition project mobilizes visual arts to render visible one of our society’s most urgent global issues. Many of the most pervasive and impactful of human activities that affect our planet remain invisible to much of the population, residing in protected urban areas. Edi Hirose exposes the effects of these industries in his native Peru. Yet, like Peru, the land of the United States, in New Mexico, West Virginia, and Texas for example, is also being continually reshaped by human actions. Through the poetics of visual art, Hirose makes the ramifications of these actions palpable to viewers, encouraging the public to broaden their knowledge and environmental awareness. 

* This body of work was first presented in Moving Mountains: Extractive Landscapes of Peru at the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 2016. Our thanks extend to VAC staff and funders, especially Center for Latin American Visual Studies at UT–Austin, Dorothea L. Leonhardt Foundation, Allison and David Ayers, and Kaleta Doolin for the original support of this project.