We Build Ruins

Seen from above, a cracked crust of salt and mud spreads in gray-brown plates, their seams traced with raised white mineral ridges. Low sun picks out every grain and fold, so the ground reads like a map of roads or rivers.
Seen from above, a gray, deeply cracked salt crust gives way to pools of milky pale-green water. At the edge of one pool a small mottled shape lies almost lost in the crust, the same color as the ground around it.
Title
We Build Ruins
Artist
Anna Friz, Rodrigo Ríos Zunino
Date
2017–ongoing
Description
A long-term art research project that has worked since 2017 in the industrialized high-altitude deserts of northern Chile's Atacama. There, copper and lithium mining for global supply chains reshapes a former seabed with rare geologic and living systems. Drawing on intensive fieldwork, the artists build multichannel sound, video, photography, live audiovisual performance and installation, and use mirage and perceptual distortion rather than documentary to question the idea of the desert as wasteland. They also note that the region has served as a Mars-analog test site. Works include Salar: Evaporation (2020), shown in the group exhibition Against Outer Space at UC Irvine's Beall Center for Art + Technology, and Salar: Adaptation, presented at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History in 2024. A feature film and an artist book are in progress.
Artwork Type
Sound Art / Field Recording
Installation
Film / Video
Materiality
Audio / Sound
Video / Digital Video
Climate & Ecology Themes
Extraction and Mining
Energy Transition
Concepts
Speculative Futures and Imagination
Ecological Domain / Habitat
Desert
Methods & Approaches
Field Research / Fieldwork
Collaborative / Co-Creation
Audience / Engagement Type
Public / General Audience
Location
Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, 705 Front Street, Santa Cruz, California; Beall Center for Art + Technology, UC Irvine, Irvine, California
Geographic Scope
International / Global
Rights
Rights held by artist or creator
Website
nicelittlestatic.com/tag/we-build-ruins
Affiliated Organizations
Acoustic and Transmission Ecologies
Beall Center for Art + Technology, UC Irvine
Publisher
UC Santa Cruz, Department of Film and Digital Media
Discipline / Field
Arts & Design
Item sets
California Art & Climate Archive
UC Irvine
UC Santa Cruz
Media
Seen from above, a cracked crust of salt and mud spreads in gray-brown plates, their seams traced with raised white mineral ridges. Low sun picks out every grain and fold, so the ground reads like a map of roads or rivers.Anna Friz and Rodrigo Ríos Zunino, We Build Ruins 1
Seen from above, a gray, deeply cracked salt crust gives way to pools of milky pale-green water. At the edge of one pool a small mottled shape lies almost lost in the crust, the same color as the ground around it.Anna Friz and Rodrigo Ríos Zunino, We Build Ruins 2