Centre Culturel Canadien
Paris, France

This Canadian Cultural Centre exhibition proposes a new and subjective crossing of the corpuses of this colossal body of work. Mounds and Voids focuses on the industrial and human means convened in the profitable exploitation of land, on the overall equilibrium of the mounds and voids created by our local imbalances, on the subterranean sections and reliefs that have nothing natural about them. Far away from the large urban centres and the everyday lives of the privileged, what imprints do the operations of digging and piling leave on our planet? What do we see and what do we know of those who dig, extract, pile up and work with bare hands where industrial machinery cannot? 

Starting with an immersive and contrasting face to face between an industrial mining site and an artisanal mining site, both in Africa. The exhibition offers a striking and paradoxical look behind the scenes at our world, inviting us to evaluate the local and global issues of the exploitation of resources. Mounds and Voids: From Human to Global Scale is also a reflection on the construction of the image and its own power, in the very singular form of the mastery of the representation of space and of the scale of things, as well as on the assumed exploitation of technology in the service of an exploring gaze thwarting and defying the limits of perception.  

The exhibition brings together two monumental works produced in Johannesburg and Madagascar from Edward Burtynsky’s most current project, Africa; additionally we explore an ensemble of augmented reality experiences constituting a meditation on the memory of industrial relics; and a condensed selection of fourteen photographs tackling the procedures of visual elaboration of land use and recycling.