Color Blind

 

We sit starving amidst our gold...

William Morris, The Socialist Ideal: Art, 1891

​

 

I. Gold

On the island of Utopia, imagined in the sixteenth century by Thomas More as the perfect society, gold is used merely to identify slaves and fabricate toys, since its fictional inhabitants value what is fundamental like iron, and not useless such as 'precious metals'. Nothing could be further from the island —and the utopia— than the claims to restore back an economy endorsed by a glint, under the influence of foreign powers. In a sort of historic nineteenth century regression, humanity is immersed once again in a gold rush without envisaging its causes or effects. Facing this evidences on one hand, the absurdity of a mining-based wealth, and on the other, the certainty given by the destruction caused by its pace, leaving nothing but a sorrowful perspective of the world. As desperate as an alchemist in search of random and essentially impossible transmutations, humans seem to trust the illusion of gold.

​

II. Green

Nature, much more aware of the nonsensicality, knows something is wrong hiding the gold as much as possible; burying it, camouflaging it. However, the techniques, processes and methods used to extract this mineral announce the arrogance of modernity, the excess of an activity that suppresses the ecosystem and prioritizes the emptiness of the demands requested by the capitalist market along its neoliberal policies. The extraction bespeaks the annihilation of a territory and its communities —without interacting or acknowledging them —, as the biggest malaise caused by gold rush, is being oblivious to the world. 'Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas' to cite Ecclesiastes, the irrational becomes tangible as gold mainly responds to an ornamental function, and as much as it is decisive as is veiled, discloses the futility of all mundane pleasures: why has gold not lost its value – an exacerbated, constructed one— and nature has?

 

III. Greening gold 

Following the destiny of the alchemical failure, which has tried alloys, separations and combinations achieving no transmutation, Golden Green - Greening Gold is a transnational company under the cover of an organization that classifies and orders gold to pretend its extraction is a logical, sustainable and green process. On the contrary, it reveals ways in which science and bureaucracy sustain these procedures masking permanent damage in the form of economic benefits. The collective anesthesia that the disguise of order, taxonomy, category and processing, legitimizes the irrational while hiding the problem and the void that sustains it. Trusting blindly in the magic of alchemy, Mexico signs treaties following foreign policies without questioning them, by allowing the exploitation of its resources in order to obtain something in return, that despite being gold, it not always glitters. Following the myth of American progress, and accepting our position as colonized culture, conventions are agreed of which we know nothing, — or more precisely, we understand nothing — as the language of the society we are trying to imitate is rather inaccessible. After the given consent, the fetish remains: Golden Green - Greening Gold uses a water spray as colonial and aspirational symbol seeking to emulate other countries. Artificially, it helps the emergence of gardens — small heterotopias imitating nature, to only reveal the simulacra— indicating the irrationalism in pretending to encapsulate the green, while simultaneously drawing lines of social oblivion.

 

IV. Golden green 

Ensuring immortality without having encountered the philosopher's stone, it is only left the modality of the irreversible, the irrevocable and the irreparable; what cannot be ceased, mended or forgiven, based on the irrational, leading to accept the absurdities upon which we construct the world are here to linger. 'Greening' the gold, 'golden' the green: this attempt only announces the absence of complicity in a world where colors have no sense any longer.

 

​

Helena Lugo