NITRATE

This extensive collection of photographic and moving image works made across 2009-14 charts the history of nitrate extraction in the Chilean Atacama Desert. A non-renewable natural resource, Nitrate was extensively mined in Northern Chile between the 1870s and 1920s, mostly by British companies who, in a relatively short space of time, transformed a portion of the Atacama Desert into an industrial landscape. Sodium nitrate was traded mainly as a natural fertiliser but it was also used in the manufacture of explosives; a crucial ingredient for the acceleration of both life and death