by Michael Pattison

Encapsulating themes of labour, extraction and archive, Stone and Mountain is a spellbinding expanded cinema performance for which Tetsuya Maruyama joins forces with Luke Fowler. At once a world-first and one-off, the performance pairs analogue stills projection with a live improvised score, ruminating on contemporary mining activities in Brazil and beyond.

In Brazil. On the one hand, Stone and Mountain is a work of sharp, geo-specific focus. Maruyama takes as his starting point an archive of 35mm colour slides proudly captured by Minerações Brasileiras Reunidas, the major subsidiarity of multinational mining corporation Vale, to document their activities and achievements in mineral excavation: labourers eclipsed by immense machines, towering vehicles transporting small mountains of minerals, aerial views of engineered earth-fill embankments and human-made undulations on a mass scale.

This land is (being) pillaged: the artist’s sound recordings, incorporated and responded to by Fowler, were primarily taken in Minas Gerais, the world-historic centre of colonial cravings and mineral extraction since the seventeenth century – and where the rare earth elements necessary for advanced technologies and renewable energy were recently discovered in abundance.

And beyond. On the other hand, Stone and Mountain taps into the infernal energies of capitalism and its eternal and comically coordinated drive – on scales that defy comprehension – toward destruction and death. Manually projecting slide carousels through his own tailor-made aperture device, Maruyama animates the archival stills in such a way that they become speculative, a body of iconographies bearing uncanny similarities to science fiction.

Citing histories as deep as the telluric shafts alluded to in the above-ground imagery, Stone and Mountain is commonly bookended by abstract images of salt, the mineral key to nineteenth-century advancements in photographic emulsion, which through a certain lens here may also evoke cosmic textures. Working in time-based, site-sensitive dialogue, Maruyama and Fowler move their discrete data into a sensory rumination on global power, catastrophically uneven distributions of wealth, the finite resources fuelling capital’s limitless demands, and the long, long centuries of imperial expansion – including settler colonialism, genocide and enslavement. Down with it.