Extractive projects can be used to jump across place and time, demonstrating the ways that systems of violence, like soil and rock, layer upon each other.

This installation evolves from a larger research project examining the entangled histories of the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in Haut-Katanga, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Illinois’s Red Gate Woods, home to the Mahattan Project’s now disappeared Site A. The ground of the former is buried in the latter. “the circle continues to eat itself” positions soil as witness and memory keeper, while offering itself as a reparative gesture to reunite the extracted materials with their site of origin.


lightbox with CNC engraving, inkjet print of a large format photograph, digital scan and optical sound from contact print of dirt collected at Red Gate Woods, IL on 16mm leader, scent of fresh dirt