Scavando si impara: la lezione peruviana
12.2 – 3.4.2022

Works of
Paccarik Orue, Thomas Lock Hobbs, Alessandro Cinque

Curated by
Steve Bisson

Orari
Sunday 4:30pm–7:30pm

Lab27 inaugurates on February 12 at 7:00 PM the exhibition “Scavando si impara. La lezione peruviana”, featuring photographs by Paccarik Orue, Thomas Lock Hobbs, and Alessandro Cinque.
Peru is among the countries most devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic. By the end of January 2022, tens of thousands of miners took to the streets to denounce working conditions that violate human dignity and to demand basic guarantees for health and safety. This situation further worsens the quality of life in mining regions already plagued by alarming levels of pollution.
The relentless pursuit of profit by major multinational corporations—eager to exploit underground resources at the expense of workers and their families, whose precarious existence leaves them with few alternatives—forces us to confront the dramatic impact of neo-colonialism in Latin America.
A sense of inevitability seems to echo Gilles Dauvé’s thesis: “capitalism will never be ecological.” From this perspective, the South American country represents an extreme frontier that nevertheless magnifies issues of global concern—matters that affect us all, despite the soothing promises of “green” marketing. By digging into the roots of exploitation, ecological devastation, and social inequality, it becomes possible to expose the threads that bind the puppeteers. That is the Peruvian lesson.
The three photographers involved have each approached this theme from their own unique perspective.

Peruvian artist Paccarik Orue takes us to Cerro de Pasco, one of the highest cities in the world (over 4,000 meters above sea level), known since the time of the Spanish conquests for its rich silver deposits. Today, foreign companies make their profits here by poisoning the land—and the fate—of the local populations. New generations carry in their blood intolerable traces of lead, arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and other externalities of an industrial development indifferent to both humanity and the environment.
The title of the project, El Muqui, refers to the daily life, folklore, and local traditions of the people of Cerro de Pasco, who, as Orue writes, are proud of their origins and of their contribution to Peru’s economy. Their wish is not to shut down the mine, but rather to see it operate responsibly, in harmony with the community. Orue celebrates the inhabitants of Cerro de Pasco and their determination to preserve the memory and integrity of their land—an equilibrium that feels as distant as a mirage.

Peru: A Toxic State is the result of a five-year journey by Alessandro Cinque, covering 10,000 kilometers and 35 mining communities. It offers a reflection on borderless neoliberalism and on the plundering carried out by a handful of corporate giants at the expense of local populations who live in poverty, deprived of water sources and stripped of their rights. Pollution not only kills livestock and destroys livelihoods—it causes anemia, respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and congenital malformations among the inhabitants.
In 2021, Peru celebrated its 200th anniversary of independence, though perhaps not yet its independence from colonial domination.

Thomas Locke Hobbs chose many years ago to relocate to South America, and Peru has since become his second home. Juliaca is a city of about 400,000 inhabitants near Lake Titicaca, in the high plains of southern Peru. It lies at the crossroads of trade routes connecting the urban centers of Cusco, Arequipa, and Bolivia. Fueled by internal migration and by the economic activity of nearby mines—both legal and illegal—the city has grown rapidly and informally, with little attention to urban services and, consequently, to the quality of its built environment.
The provisional nature of its buildings, their unfinished facades, and the gray, dusty landscape reflect a fragile economy that, since colonial times, has largely depended on global commodity flows—chiefly the price of copper and gold. According to the American photographer, Juliaca represents a kind of local response or adaptation to global challenges, shaped as much by the wind and the crisp light filtering through the thin atmosphere as by the forces of extraction. Here, geography itself is defined by mining.

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