Series Award Edition X — 1st Prize:
LORENZO POLI
SPIRALS OF THE ANTHROPOCENE
PHOTOGRAPHY : LORENZO POLI
EDITORIAL : LIFE FRAMER, PICTURA GALLERY & LORENZO POLI
The Kingdom of Accumulation
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The unending horizons of expansive extractivist empires. Escondida Copper Mine, Antofagasta Chile, February 2024. The Escondida Mine, is renowned as the largest copper mine in the world.
Gridded Impermanence
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Cycles of extraction overwhelming life and death. Chuquicamata Mine and miners’ settlement, Atacama, Chile, November 2023. The cemetery, the abandoned miners’ settlement being swallowed by the unending expansion of the mine.
Earthly Womb
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Where cosmic winds and human ambition converge. Chuquicamata Main Mine pit, Atacama, Chile, February 2024. The second largest open-pit copper mine in the world by excavated volume and the second deepest, reaching depths of approximately 1,000 meters.
The Circles of Hell
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Where sins take form. Escondida Copper Mine, Antofagasta, Chile, December 2023.
Be still, the Earth will speak to you — Aboriginal Proverb
We’re delighted to announce Lorenzo Poli as the winner of our Edition X Series Award with his series Spirals of the Anthropocene, judged by Lisa Woodward and Mia Dalglish, co-curators at Pictura Gallery in Bloomington, IN.
Lorenzo Poli’s photographs have a monstrous grandeur. In this series, he illuminates the issue of resource mining in South America. But Poli moves beyond documentation, connecting the viewer to an allegorical way of thinking about form.
The project circles around one shape – the inverted cone, the gouge in the earth. Rather than feeling monotonous, the deep holes take on more substantial meaning with every image. The land has been scooped out in almost mythic proportions, carving something like an inverse pyramid into the ground, a monument to our unquenchable appetites.
Poli’s visual language runs parallel to that of magical realism and gives the series a unique depth and communicative power. The foundation of his photographs are depictions of reality, but they are seamlessly paired with allegorical concepts. It appears that humans really did build Dante’s inferno, with our own drive, hands, ingenuity and greed.
In his images, we experience the earth like an astronaut walking on an alien planet. The project’s muted color palette is calming, beautiful in a graphic way, with its tightly controlled tonal range. But when you realize what you’re seeing, it’s disquieting. A huge piece of land is dusty grey with faint red stains seeping through, markers of the earth being drained and dissected.
The Mountain of Silver
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The skeleton of minted Globalisation, Cerro Rico – Bolivia 1545. Cerro Rico looms over the Bolivian plateau like a hollowed ghost, its sterling veins once pulsing with the imperial riches of globalisation. Beneath its shimmering prosperity lies a maze of tunnels spiralling into endless voids, with layers of toxic amalgams stratified into the hillsides. Mercuric fumes, silicosis, and caves-in plague miners past and present, and have left a toll of millions over five centuries (E. Galeano).
Minted Icon – 1840
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The globalised materialisation of a sterling Treasure. Since 1545, Cerro Rico’s silver fuelled globalised colonial trade to Europe, Manila, the Ming Dynasty, and beyond. It financed wars, and empires of slavery. At its peak, Potosi supplied 60% of the world’s silver, embedding plata and argent as synonyms for wealth in Latin America and French colonies.
The Nine Circles of Hell
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Illustration for The Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy by A. Kopisch, 1842. Ed E. Buchhandlung (F. Müller). Limbo, for virtuous pagans, in sorrow eternally. Lust, souls blown by violent winds. Gluttony, gluttons in vile slush. Greed, with hoarders & squanderers pushing weights. Wrath, with the angry fighting and sullen submerged. Heresy, with heretics in flaming tombs. Violence, split into rings of blood, trees, and burning sand. Fraud, in ten ditches of torments. Treachery, in icy Lake Cocytus. Web image upscaled via Gigapixel AI.
Mining Infinity
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The unending spiralling of anthropocentric ambitions. Sierra Gorda Copper Mine, Antofagasta, Chile, December 2023.
This photographic investigation is a personal reflection on human values and how they carve into the Land. As a European architect expanding into the metaphysical realms of the visual arts, I traversed South America’s mining territories for 18 months in search of meaning.
I sought to engage with the spiritual dimensions of our epoch, immersing myself in monumental voids descending into the Earth. What emerged transcended the commodification of minerals; these voids stand as testaments to humanity’s aspirations.
While ancestral geoglyphs once etched cosmovisions into the ground, the Anthropocene now inscribes modernity’s chronicles onto Earth’s body. From lunar paths spiralling down into infinities to gridded imprints of industrial impermanence, sacred lands have become kingdoms of accumulation, empires of extraction. These are the geoglyphs of our time–monuments to the values we pursue.
Humans possess the divine power to consciously and collectively cooperate. Through Spirals of the Anthropocene, I draw viewers into an enigmatic vortex of human ambition and ecological disruption. It urges a collective language–an idiom of Nature above anthropocentrism.
The geoglyphs of our epoch stand as testaments to our dominion over the Earth, yet they ask: what if we chose a new path?
– Lorenzo Poli
Self-organising Geographies
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Terraforming patterns of sprawling tailings. The emergent patterns of life’s transcendent resilience. Chuquicamata Mine, Atacama, Chile, November 2023. Self-organising patterns emerge from the waste rock deposit at the edge of the of one of the largest extractive operations on the planet. Mines emerges from the ground as new complex systems. While instigated and managed by human decision-making, the intricate dance of emergent granular choreographies transcend human-scale control, human intent and natural order seems to converge.
Frontlines of Ambition
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Human endurance encroaching into jagged terrains of extraction. La Rinconada Gold Mine, Peru, November 2024.
Arteries of Ambition
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The relentless pulse of globalised flows. Cerro Verde Copper Mine, Arequipa, Peru, November 2024.
Shell of the Anthropocene.
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The sedimentary processes of monumental mining depositions. Chuquicamata Mine. Atacama, Chile, February 2024.
Glacial Orb
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The Silent witness to the unrelentless extractivist ambitions. La Rinconada Gold Mine, Peru, November 2024.
It’s not easy to conceptualize the sheer amount of ground covered by the mines. But in Poli’s photographs, we start to feel it. Humans have built things of an extraordinary scale, and Poli shows our ability to dismantle at an equally formidable level.
The presiding jury
The Chamber of Absence
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Where the Vacuum Descends into Hollowness. Sierra Gorda Copper Mine, Antofagasta, Chile Feb 2024.
