Corporeal Red (video, 11:38 min) & Corporeal Red: a landscape (2021) document the bauxite waste pond situated near the Danube Delta waters in Romania. Being the raw source of aluminum production, bauxite is amongst the most extracted ores around the globe, mostly in Global South resource-rich territories, due to its extensive use in almost each economic sector, from military equipment to aircraft and automobile manufacture to food industry. The residues of its refinery process, also known as red mud, are one of the most abundant industrial wastes on the planet, with over 3 billion tons being currently stored in massive tailings ponds and an additional of 150 million tons being generated each year. Corporeal Red (video, 10:58 min) combines found footage from Ghana and Guinea with both aerial and closeup scanning of the bauxite residuals in Tulcea, Romania. While images compose an aesthetics of the wretched earth, the text accompanying the video tries to situate the genealogy of the current development of extractive industry in the modern/colonial formation of the world-system. Corporeal Red: a landscape is an installation which acts as an embodiment of a toxic environment, deprived of its own agency, but also as a comment on the extents of female reproductive labor in territories regarded as extractible. Both works comment on the how the ecological relation between species of a particular local geography becomes under the auspice of capitalism a financialized relation. Corporeal Red (video, 11:38 min) & Corporeal Red: a landscape (2021) were part of The Current Affair of Some Young Romanian Artists, Ivan Gallery.
