CAROL IGLESIAS OTERO
Writer,
photographer, and social anthropologist
Carol Iglesias Otero (b. 1993) is a social anthropologist and photographer currently based in Mexico’s southern Gulf coast, between the states of Tabasco and Campeche. In her academic research, Carol examines how the lives of workers in Mexico’s oil industry are impacted by environmental transformations and financial crisis. She has also participated in a research initiative which seeks to visualize the financial structures of ICE’s carceral infrastructure in central Florida, a project for which she collaborated with a coalition of immigration activists seeking to close a migrant detention center in Glades County. Carol holds an M.A. in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Reed College. Her academic work has been featured in Platypus, the CASTAC Blog and her creative work has been shown at the Logan Arts Center in the University of Chicago, at the Lisbon Architecture Trienal in the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporanea do Chiado and at the Centre for Forensic Architecture in London.
Petroleum Waterscapes offers a meditation on the extraction and transport of fossil fuels in coastal Tabasco, where Mexico’s largest oil deposits are found. Popular songs and regional toponyms point to Tabasco as an Eden, the proverbial garden where vegetation is lush, rivers overflow every season, and tropical species abound. Yet since the 1960s, a different kind of abundance has come to dominate and shape the region’s landscapes and occupations, which now gravitate around its underground petroleum reserves. This photography series offers us a visual path through forms of life that take place side-by-side with the extraction and commercialization of millions of barrels of oil every single day.
Online
May - October 2024 (ongoing)
An arrangement of fifteen hand built ceramics open pipelines suspended on found urban materials: bricks, rocks, pieces of abandoned plywood. The ceramic pipelines were manually glazed by melting tar with a propane torch. The pipelines create an open system where crude oil is held in a fragile equilibrium, sometimes dropping from one piece ot the next, sometimes suspended.
University of Chicago Logan Arts Center
February 2024
(collaboration)
Activist-led research project investigating a hybrid county jail and federal migrant detention center, built on a former sugarcane sugarcane plantation in the Florida Everglades.
Report Authors: Emma Shaw Crane, Carol Iglesias Otero, Neha Nimmagudda, and Daria Reaven.
Visual Research and Production: Carol Iglesias Otero
In partnership with the Shut Down Glades Coalition, including Americans for Immigrant Justice, American Friends Service Committee of Florida, Earthjustice, Freedom for Immigrants, Immigrant Action Alliance, and Seeds of Resistance.
September 2021 - October 2024 (ongoing)
By listening to the sounds of weather in the midst of an industrial operation that attempts to isolate cognitive and logistical work from environmental exposure and yet is thoroughly structured by it, my intention has been to explore how tension emerges between cognitive, industrial, and atmospheric rhythms.
August 2023
(collaboration)
Geologic Subjectivities is an interactive performance, based on a multi-character narration of Portuguese and EU’s genome mining in the Atlantic Ocean. The script follows the history of Lisbon’s colonial architectures vis-a-vis the journey of the Pyrolobus Fumarii, a deep-sea bacteria currently tested for the development of new cosmetics. Touching on austerity policies, deep-sea investment, Portuguese offshore territories, and colonial, still powerful themes of “discovery and exploration”, the performance excavates the long duree of extractivism on the ocean, the city, and the human and non-human body.
Design and Concept: Lodovica Guarnieri
Text: Lodovica Guarnieri and Carol Iglesias
Performance: Catarina Vieira
Music: Marco Tomesani
Lisbon Architecture Trienal
October 2019
(collaboration)
‘Troubled Soil’ investigates the Irish border
by looking at how border leakage emerges not only from the unboundedness of the earthly but from its industrialized exploitation. The investigation of mining advances in the area of the Sperrins, Tyrone County (Northern Ireland) exposes the border not as a delimitation between two national sovereign bodies, but as a historical zone marked by displacement and dispossession. Land leased off and opened up to mining business, the Sperrins reveal the act of bordering as the demarcation of a sacrificial periphery. Here, the right to not be bounded thusly is interpreted as a twofold reckoning: neither is it possible to contain the site of extraction and its toxics leakages, nor should those who inhabit such space be bound by the political decision to make them weather the impacts. Conceived as a theatrical play, the installation revolves around two testimonies videos: on one side, the voices of activists, politicians and journalists interviewed in-situ, and on the other, the voice of the landscape. During the event the public could follow the video and navigate the archive by reading the theatre script.
Team: Dimitra Andritsou, Erica Deluchi, Lodovica
Guarnieri and Carol Iglesias
Lewisham Irish Community Centre
May 2019
(collaboration)
The texts gathered in this volume emerge out of the investigations developed by the students of the MA studio in Forensic Architecture. Each of these projects avoids taking the comfortable stance of detached, “learned” criticism that still abounds in academia. Rather, they speak to the desire of somehow implicating oneself in a given social, political, and environmental conflict, while at the same time resisting the imperative of mechanical reaction and (white-)saviour activism. The double bind between political action and theoretical elaboration that these projects grapple with is reflected in the structure of this publication, which combines, on the one hand, entries constituting a tactical field manual of sorts (in which students share DIY skills that they have used to research, expose, and visualise different forms of injustice and violence) with, on the other, the operative concepts that have guided those very investigations. Together, the materials presented here testify to the students’ attempts to inhabit the often uncomfortable and risky position of the self-critical interventionist. And, quite simply, to think at the time of crisis.
Editorial team: Carol Iglesias Otero, Tara Plath and Avi Varma
Designed team: Dimitra Andritsou, Imani Jacqueline Brown,
Anna Engelhardt and Tiago Patatas
May 2019