Amazone

Unasur-Oil Basin Exhibition Logo

IIRSA/Manta-Manaus Inter-oceanic Corridor Proposal

Video installation Screenshots

Video installation Screenshots

Storefront for Art and Architecture Newsletter (design: Neil Donnelly)

Exhibit at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York

Exhibit at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York

Exhibit at the Taubman Art and Architecture Gallery, Ann Arbor

Video installation and logo for Some True Stories exhibition, curated by Keller Easterling

 

Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York (Nov – Dec, 2008)

University of Michigan Taubman Art and Architecture Gallery, Ann Arbor (Feb – Mar, 2010)

Concept and design:
Santiago del Hierro, Carol Ann Ruiz
Video edition:
Keren Weinberg
Photography
Katy Barkan, Nicole Beattie, Santiago del Hierro, Ana María Durán, Jimena Leiva, Manuel Mansylla, Catherine Venart

The Napo River has been proposed as a means of extending the Amazon to the Pacific to create a trans-oceanic corridor that would bypass the Panama Canal and facilitate a new set of trade alignments for South America.  These new global trade expectations compete for influence with oil exploration, fragile rainforest reserves, and dispersed indigenous communities in a region already packed with myths and political unknowns. The Napo, with its multiple interests, could be the site of business-as-usual or an experiment in leveraging and orchestrating trade-offs between extraction and preservation.

Amazone presents the contradictory stories of these multiple interests in the same sloppy way they are encountered in the field. It tells the tale with the original amusement of discovering facts and data that seem to have been hidden from the public. None of the documents, maps and videos can be found in an organized database. Each of them presents just one piece of a growing puzzle.