Glück auf! [Good luck!]

The Mine Gives, The Mine Takes. This is the title of an earlier work by Ana Alenso, which deals with the new gold rush in Venezuela. The mining is largely taking place in illegal mines deep in the jungle, run by criminal gangs, guerrillas and paramilitaries, with devastating effects on the people and nature living there. The phrase sounds like an echo of an old Tyrolean country rhyme from the 16th century: “Das und anders mehr, kommt alles vom Bergbau her” [This and other things more, it all comes from mining ore]. When did the illusion creep into people’s imaginations that the treasures underground could be obtained in infinite quantities and virtually without cost? The price for the extraction and use of gigantic amounts of fossil raw materials is now being paid by all of humanity. The accumulation of catastrophic natural events and the ongoing political debate about how to deal with them have made it impossible to overlook the fact that we are in a sort of payback situation. However, with respect to all the other materials used by industrial civilization, the wishful dream of unlimited availability seems to persist and even renew itself, the more disconnected the lives of the majority of people who benefit from its outputs are from the realities of mining. Ana Alenso’s work Glück auf! [Good luck!], created for My Precious, deconstructs this belief in infinity as an optical illusion and reflects the equally naive and unsubstantiated attitude of entitlement of the people from consumer societies.