The Extractive Machine

PAV in Turin continues its investigation into the antagonistic relationship between environmental activism and neo-liberism politics on a global scale.

The Extractive Machine, curated by Marco Scotini, is the new exhibition with which PAV continues its investigation into the antagonistic relationship between environmental activism and neo-liberism politics on a global scale. The show aims to become a further examination of the forms of colonialism (both historic and current) with which the West continues to leave its imprint on the destinies of the world, cultures and nature in a, by now, irreversible way.

Top: Pedro Neves Marques, the pudic relation between machine and plant, 2016. Above: Oliver Ressler, Leave It in the Ground (contruct glimpses of utopia), 2013

An idea shared by several theorists (from David Harvey to Saskia Sassen) sees the current financial system as being the second phase of capitalism: the one defined as “extractive capitalism”. No longer exclusively linked to modernist productivity, mass consumption and the circulation of goods, new capitalism appears rather as a gigantic mechanism for the extraction of value from humankind and nature, with the progressive inclusion of all possible resources and which excludes no areas of either individual life or the natural environment.

Oliver Ressler, Leave It in the Ground (the cleanest oil), 2013

The works by these five exhibiting artists are animated by an activist and trans-disciplinary spirit. They aim to explore the ecological environment from different observation perspectives, concentrating on phenomena such as pollution, desertification, climate change, the privatization of agricultural crops or the unequal redistribution of the costs and advantages implied by the environmental modifications currently in force.

Oliver Ressler, Leave It in the Ground (think the impossible), 2013


26 March – 4 June 2017
The extractive machine
curated by Marco Scotini
Parco Arte Vivente – PAV
via Giordano Bruno 31, Turin