PROVISIONAL CARTOGRAPHY
Provisional Cartography includes the following works:
- Video – Expropriated Life
- Video – Expropriated Death
- Video – Expropriated Love
- Video – Provisional Cartography – interview with my mother
- Installation – Dead Souls
VIDEO – EXPROPRIATED LIFE (11.25 minutes)
Expropriated Life examines how new forms of money, financed through the exploitation of enslaved lives, allowed slave owners to weather abolition without real economic loss, effectively granting them the power to issue their own currency to pay newly freed workers at minimal cost. The project is part of Trilogy of Expropriation, set in nineteenth-century Spanish Cuba and grounded in the study of three manuscripts tracing transformations in money, insurance, and law.
VIDEO – EXPROPRIATED DEATH (13.19 minutes)
Expropriated Death focuses on how slaveholders combined emerging insurance technologies to create policies on enslaved people. These instruments compensated owners for the loss of enslaved individuals’ productive capacity, whether through injury or death, transforming human life into an insured financial risk. The project is part of Trilogy of Expropriation, set in nineteenth-century Spanish Cuba and grounded in the study of three manuscripts tracing transformations in money, insurance, and law.
VIDEO – EXPROPRIATED LOVE (08.29 minutes)
Expropriated Love focuses on the emergence of commercial law in the nineteenth century and its consequences. This new legal order required anyone seeking justice to confront a specialized and complex system designed primarily to protect the privileges of capital. The project is part of Trilogy of Expropriation, set in nineteenth-century Spanish Cuba and grounded in the study of three manuscripts tracing transformations in money, insurance, and law.
VIDEO – PROVISIONAL CARTOGRAPHY – interview with my mother (60.01 minutes)
Provisional Cartography is the discussion of concepts and traits of a new era, that of the Aesthetics of Extinction. It is organized in eight chapters: Substrate of the Image; Materialism; Evolution; Virtual Reality; Construction of the Virtual; Technological Gaze; Image & Knowledge; and Infrastructures.
INSTALLATION – DEAD SOULS (80 glazed ceramic hand-painted heart)
Once life is subsumed into calculation, it forfeits its evental character and persists only as inscription. Corporeal singularity yields to juridical equivalence, while death itself is reabsorbed into a legal apparatus that extends control beyond biological limits.
Under technical rationality, the living is reconfigured as operable matter. Singularity is neutralized, identity rendered contingent, and intervention authorized by procedural efficacy. Life is not excluded from power, but captured within it—and emptied of meaning through its administration.
“Buy those peasants who have died before the next census—buy a thousand of them, for instance—and the Board of Guardians will give you two hundred rubles per soul: that alone will furnish you with a capital of two hundred thousand.”
Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol
