Geraldine Meneses Ortiz

"Sacrifice Zones"

Section MS12, Riccardo Badano

Keywords: borders, book, environment

The project looks at “sacrifice zones” - areas permanently impaired by environmental damage or economic disinvestment. - as border geographies transcending national boundaries.   The 2-metre-long concertina wants to address recurrent features of sacrifice zones by combining 3 heterogeneous elements across the pages.   A visual analysis of a graveyard of wind turbines located in Evia, North-South-East-West of Greece, translates the video material collected on-site into a sequence of images. It aims to unpack the temporality of the sacrifice zones and the detrimental effects they produce in the present, soon to be passed to future generations.   The notion of scale, useful to understand the impact of Sacrifice Zones at the level of the landscape, is addressed in a series of aerial photographs dispersed through the scroll.   Finally, to analyse how the language of environmental justice is articulated globally, the visuals are intersected by selected excerpts from the speech Civilization Against Freedom that Pepe Mujica – then president of Uruguay and one of the world leaders most sensible to the environmental cause - delivered to the UN in 2013.