Geometric Forests: Struggles on Mapuche Land

The Rencontres d’Arles presents “Geometric Forests: Struggles on Mapuche Land,” an exhibition curated by Sergio Valenzuela Escobedo and featuring works documenting the environmental degradation of Mapuche rainforests in southern Chile with the onset of paper pulp monocultures, and the Mapuche fight to save the land’s biodiversity. At the same time that this land is transformed, the show explores the violence which this commercial and political exploitation fuels between nationalist organizations, industrialists’ private militias and army anti-terrorist forces. Thus, the show engages a dialectic between the free-market economic paradigm of unlimited consumption and the paradigm which considers the relationship of living beings to their environment to be irrevocable and spiritual.