Much of colonial history remains hidden from view. The unsettling truths that underlie its workings are often obfuscated by images that not only conceal its destructive nature, but aim to ennoble it by invoking ideas like development, progress, and growth, depicted as being ushered into the world by the benevolent bearers of the “white man’s burden”1. Italian artist, Pietro Lo Casto, draws on a tradition of postcolonial art, scholarship, and activism, using installation, mixed media collages, photography, and collaboratively produced textile and video works as a means to excavate and expose hidden histories of neocolonial extractivism, and to better understand their impact on the present.
He engages in what he calls an “archaeology of the invisible”, undertaking an excavation of the invisibilized impacts of teak logging and hydropower dam projects on local ecologies along the Salween River border. He invites viewers to join him in peeling back the layers of concealment in colonial imagery, revealing artifacts that speak to an alternative way of seeing that counters and contradicts colonial depictions. Understanding the way images work to hide practices of exploitation behind narratives of progress makes it possible to see how these histories work to constitute and shape the present, and how these strategies are still deployed today. Historical and geological connections between the artist’s research site and the exhibition space draw his site-specific exploration of the Salween River out into a wider context and demonstrate that the impacts of colonial and capitalist extraction are temporally and spatially entangled, and not restricted by contrived territorial boundaries.
Seeking alternative ways of being, seeing, and knowing that disrupt distorted narratives derived from the “god’s eye view”2 of the colonial lens, Lo Casto draws attention to the deeply embedded relationships of indigenous P’gakenyaw people with the more-than-human ecologies of the Salween River. In keeping with his decolonial aims, Lo Cast limits his own interventions primarily to the impacts of extraction along the Salween River. He cedes space to the indigenous people most affected by these practices to speak to their own situated experiences through collaborative works that offer alternative ways of seeing and center knowledges that have been marginalized in the name of profiting from “cheap lives” and “cheap nature”.3 These counter-hegemonic perspectives invite a broader personal excavation, aimed at exposing the obstructing ideologies that are embedded in everyday images.
Text by Blake Palmer, Curator
References
Kipling, R. (1899). The white man's burden: The United States & The Philippine Islands, 1899. McClure's Magazine, 12.
Scott, J. C. (1999). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press.
Moore, J. W., & Patel, R. (2017). A history of the world in seven cheap things: A guide to capitalism, nature, and the future of the planet. University of California Press.
