Verne’s cry of discovery echoes into our present, but its meaning has shifted. The contemporary
subterranean is not just a geological stratum; it is the data mine, the biological sample, the
archived memory beneath the skin. We no longer journey to the centre of the earth, but into the
extracted core of our own existence.

Once, on a certain winter day, I stood before a vast landscape of cliffs in south west England —
surrounded by the sea, the rocks, the clouds, the soil. I was absorbed in the rawness of it, in the need to
share that encounter with another: a friend, a lover, someone who would understand the quiet pull
between body and earth. Like so many of us, I carried a device that extends my gaze and captures
presence. That moment became not just a photograph, but a data imprint — a digital echo of an
embodied experience. We are here, on this earth, and simultaneously there, in the cloud. A photograph is
made; an extraction occurs. (personal note from the curator, December 2018)

This exhibition, The Extractive Gaze: Data, Soil & Body, explores the parallel systems of
control that see both the Earth's skin and human skin as contested territories. The colonial gaze
that once mapped land for extraction now operates as a biometric and corporate gaze, still a
matter of war and colonization, erosion, desertification and ethnic cleanse. Our faces and
fingerprints unlock devices; our gestures feed the cloud; our movements in the city are tracked;
our genetic code becomes a resource for pharmaceutical empires. As theorist Shoshana Zuboff warns in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, “The goal now is to automate us.” We are the
raw material. The “virtual you” is the new oil, mined, refined, and distributed through invisible
circuits of power.

In this system, the gaze becomes a tool of extraction. It is the mode of looking that frames its
target—be it a forest, a body of water, or a human body—as an object available for taking. The
Earth’s skin is stripped of its minerals, its oil, its life — while human skin, too, is mined for data,
reduced to code, image, and biometric trace. The parallel is not metaphorical but material.

In response, the artists in this exhibition propose a different kind of looking: a deeper, more
attentive gaze. They present works that are portraits of the earth in different tones and
perspectives. That engages with elemental materials—stone, sound, oil, clay, soil, paper,
resin—and technological devices, creating connections that ask us to reconsider our
relationship with these layers. The soil holds fossils, seeds, minerals — a geological memory of
transformation. Our own skin holds DNA, scars, and the memory of touch and trauma — a
biological memory of intimacy and survival.

As you move through the space, you are encouraged to listen, to observe the textures and the
hum of data. Here we are invited to linger — to look longer, to feel the porousness of our
presence. The earth, in its many forms, is not a passive backdrop. It steadily gazes back. In a
world of constant extraction, how do we move from being a resource to be mined back to being
a body in reciprocal contact with the earth?