Alessandra Alliata NobiliMonteleone spoke to ArTalkers last March about his visual investigation in the mines of Chile and of the Democratic Republic of Congo, sites of extraction of the minerals necessary for the abandonment of fossil fuels, and of his practice at large.
Holding an MA in art and politics from Goldsmiths University in London, Davide Monteleone (born 1974) is interested in the intersections between geopolitics, economics and the environment. He has extensively explored China, Russia and the Caucasus, documenting both the historical legacies and the new ambitions of post-communism through his photography.
A contributor to numerous international publications including Time Magazine, The New Yorker, National Geographic, The New York Times, Monteleone is a three-time winner of the World Press Photo and holder of prestigious awards such as the Sony World Photography Awards, UK in 2024, The Climate Pledge – National Geographic Grantee, US (2023) European Publisher Award (2011), the Asian Society Fellowship (2016) and the National Geographic Fellowship (2019) among many others. He has also exhibited in art galleries including the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo and the Saatchi Gallery in London.
Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). August 2023. – COMIAKOL Mutoshi Artisanal Mining (ASM) Cooperative. Portrait of a miner. In early 2018, Chemaf decided to develop the Mutoshi concession near Kolwezi (a town of about 500,000 inhabitants). The cooperative intends to provide better conditions for 5,000 miners without work permits who work in artisanal mining. Regularization entailed controlled access to the mine site by the project partners, open-pit operations, training and higher health and safety standards, as well as the creation of a shared financial opportunity for the local community. The reality is very different. Despite their intentions, miners dig for cobalt and copper in difficult conditions, often barefoot in tunnels much deeper than the declared 30 meters. They also no longer had the ability to store the ore until prices rose to negotiate a better deal with the company that owns the concession. Instead, they now depend on the terms set by a Chinese middleman that operates illegally at the largest cobalt processors in China, the world’s largest importer of cobalt.
The project Critical Minerals begins between 2021 and 22, though you have been interested in the dynamics of power and in the economies of geopolitics for a long time. A Modern Odissey, (2012), the short film on board a ship on an Arctic route from Russia to China made possible by the melting of the ice, Sinomocene (2014) on the Chinese Belt and Road plan, and more recently a project on CO2 storage are but few examples.
Davide Monteleone: My interest in geopolitics began in 2014. I had been working as photojournalist and documentary photographer, but at that point I started looking at things trying to understand their deeper motivations.
Wars, conflicts and economic crises, which I had been dealing with for many years and which are normally photographed at the peak of their violent manifestation, understandably have a much longer genesis. I understood that this was what I was interested in telling, trying to photograph what is not immediately visible.
I focused on concepts such as economics and climate. A Modern Odissey was the first story on climate in 2012 when there was still little talk of melting ice. It was an opportunity to start talking about climate change. Then came Sinomocene, the economy of the Belt and Road, China’s huge soft-power enterprise.
Chile, April 2023. Albemarle Facility. Albemarle workers collecting samples from a lithium pond. Chilean Lithium is processed through a method that involves the use of big evaporation ponds where the extracted brine water, carried out and pumped from a series of underground wells, is collected and left to evaporate, while exposed to weather elements.
The brine, a “complex soup” with a variety of salts, is in fact concentrated in large pools for 12 to 18 months, with an addition of lime and sodium. Since these salts have different solubilities, the final element remaining after more than a year is a 6% concentrated lithium, which is then sent to the chemical plant where lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide are produced.
Albemarle is one of the two companies owning a lithium mine in the Salar de Atacama.
Located in the southern part of the Salar, it is smaller than SQM’s mine, but still a leading industry in the field. Chile has the largest lithium reserves in the world. The country is the second global producer of this metal, essential in the upcoming energy switch for its utilization in the production of electric batteries for vehicles, smart devices, renewable power plants, and other technologies helping the world transition away from fossil fuels. According to the Chilean government’s projections, global demand for lithium will quadruple by 2030, reaching 1.8 million tonnes. The Atacama region, which is also home to vast copper mines, supplies nearly one-quarter of the globe’s lithium. The private-owned mining companies SQM and Albemarle take the lead in the commercialization and development of the material, often at the expense of the environment and small communities.
The metal is, in fact, extracted through the evaporation of brines found beneath salt flats on South America’s Atacama Plateau, a water-intensive method that drains already scarce water resources, damages wetlands, and harms communities.
Recently with Critical Minerals you have started exploring the new frontiers of energy.
Davide Monteleone: Critical Minerals tries to investigate with optimism the new energy sources but also looks at the boom of artificial intelligence. Both these new technologies and the transition to a green economy consume large quantities of natural resources that are no longer oil and coal but lithium, cobalt, nickel and many others.
You wrote that upstream of your projects you research extensively. Can you briefly describe how you prepared for Critical Minerals?
Davide Monteleone: I am methodical, and I tend to work always in the same way. First, I collect an archive database with articles and everything that has been written, told and photographed on the topic I intend to address. I use a mapping system a lot, from Google Earth to Google Maps to other slightly more sophisticated satellite systems to identify very precisely the places where I want to go. Then the work of contacts and logistics begins.
It was quite simple for Chile: the mining companies were easy to locate and so were the contacts with their press offices. Congo was much more complicated. It is a difficult country both from a logistics and security points of view, and I worked with a local person.
Critical Minerals has collaborative components with other storytellers. In Chile too I worked with a local person, more for a spirit of collaboration than out of necessity.
In previous projects I also tried to dispel the stereotype of the solitary documentary photographer. By now I find this definition stringent, at least for me. So, depending on the project, I choose collaborators with specific skills.
For Sinomocene I worked with an economist and a team of data designers. In the case of Critical Minerals I collaborate with a series of local storytellers so that both my vision and a global vision are present in the story, together with other points of view driven by a deep knowledge of the local territory and culture.
Chile, April 2023. Ghost town of Chuquicamata. Aerial view of the former town, open pit, and waste heaps. The town of Chuquicamata was founded as a mining camp when mining operations opened. After much open pit mining and expansion, the town ended up being too close to the mining operations. Dust from the mine and gases from the nearby smelter forced the mining company to relocate the entire town. In addition to health and safety concerns, the company was running out of places to dump the mine waste. To extract 1 kilogram of copper, 100 kilograms of rock must be removed from the ground. That waste material has to go somewhere. So now the site of the former town is starting to be buried by mine waste. Most of the town is still unburied and is a ghost town. The residents have been relocated to Calama, a city about 15 kilometers away. Codelco, the government company that owns the mine, built over 5,000 houses, one for each family. Residents began moving out in 2004, and in September 2007 Chuquicamata was officially abandoned.
During the research phase do you also decide on the aesthetic approach you are going to take?
Davide Monteleone: I collect what I would define a ‘visual mood’, that is, my interests of the moment, which changes and evolves and always has a coherence with the story. If there are more technological or emotional themes, that will be the approach.
Have you often found correspondences of your research on the field or have your expectations sometimes been overturned?
Davide Monteleone: In the Sinomocene project, a journey and a photograph changed the project’s direction It was a photo of two Cossacks patrolling the border between Russia and China in a remote area.
That image I created made me think that not only was the situation surreal, but also the concepts I wanted to tell were so abstract that perhaps photography alone was not enough, or that it was only one of the tools that could trigger the public’s curiosity.
As for Critical Minerals, it is a story with several polarizations: on the one hand, a technological transformation is necessary to transition to renewable energy sources, on the other, this also has a cost, so it is necessary to take stock of the benefits and compromises that make us evolve as a civilization.
From what I have seen, the photographs taken in Chile mainly concern landscapes.
Davide Monteleone: The Lithium chapter, present at the Fair in Bologna, includes abstract and aerial landscape photographs, photographic stitching made with a drone, sometimes even twenty or thirty photographs recomposed together. This is to have very defined details even on very large landscapes, the size of about fifteen football fields. Aesthetically they are a bit influenced by photographer Edward Burtynski’s Anthropocene and by the pictorial tradition of American Abstractionism.
Russia, Blagoveschensk, February 2020. The Chinese city of Heihe seen from the Blagoveschensk embankment on the frozen Amur River. The writing on the building can be translated as “Go Wuhan”, the encouraging message to the city where the Coronavirus outbreak began. Blagoveschensk and Heihe are separated by about 600 m.
Does painting, or art in general, some time inspire the aesthetics of your images?
Davide Monteleone: Absolutely, a lot of visual art, literature and cinema. Photography is a very young art; I don’t think that on its own is enough to cover all the potential inspirations that an emerging artist like me needs to experiment with.
Returning to Critical Minerals: in Congo you also portrayed several local characters. For the part of the project that concerns the Kolwezi mine you wrote a text, published on your website, recognizing the criticality of a Western gaze on some realities, because it can reproduce the same mechanisms of exploitation that it aims to show. What is your approach when you photograph delicate or controversial situations?
Davide Monteleone: It has been a worry of mine for a long time, and not only mine, but it is also a lively debate that has concerned documentary photography for several decades.
In Congo I was very aware of the fact that it would be difficult to avoid the gaze on the human being that I have often tried to avoid in recent projects. In recent years my aesthetic has been more oriented towards that kind of German photography where the human figure is distant, or very small inserted in vast landscapes.
The core of the story in Congo is human exploitation, or the possibilities that local people do not yet have to exploit their resources. The only way I have found so far to avoid an imposing gaze is a formal attention to the aesthetics of the composition, to give dignity to people, so that their physicality is not portrayed in a way that makes them appear submissive or even more humiliated. The choice of the shot and the position of a body can change this aspect a lot.
Another way to avoid the gaze you were talking about was to collaborate with a local photographer who necessarily has a different gaze from mine.
Ethiopia, October 2019. Locals working at the Grand Reneissance Dam. The Grand Reneissance Dam is one of the largest infrastructure projects under construction in Ethiopia with the support of Chinese investment. It is a gravity dam on the Blue Nile River in Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region. With a capacity of 6.45 gigawatts, once completed the dam will be the largest hydroelectric power plant in Africa and the seventh largest in the world. The estimated construction cost of $4.8 billion corresponds to about 5% of Ethiopia’s gross domestic product, which was $87 billion in 2017. China has financed the project with $1.8 billion.
The photographic image bears a legacy of truth and transparency, even though we know that manipulation has accompanied the history of photography since its inception. Today more than ever. Countless publications have been written on the subject. I was wondering how you relate to this paradox, given that you often contextualize your images with long explanatory captions.
Davide Monteleone: My captions are always quite extensive, this is obviously true for the contexts in which it is possible, which vary from publishing to art galleries, where captions often do not appear. I believe that only authority and transparency can balance the paradox you are talking about.
I will clarify with an example that I always give to my students: people read and get information from the New York Times because it is credible, it has built its own authority. I think that the photographer, and the visual artist in general, can build the same authority, not only informative but ethical and moral. That is, to declare: I see things this way, and I tell you about them this way. Whether they are transformed, whether there are interventions in the images or not, has little importance when the message is clear.
What are the future developments of Critical Minerals? Have you planned something yet?
Davide Monteleone: Not yet. Right now, Critical Minerals it is having good visibility and success in Galleries. It will be published by the National Geographic Magazine between the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, when it will be concluded, and there is the idea of making an exhibition aimed at certain categories of policy makers who have something to do with the choices of how to obtain these critical minerals. In the process of finalizing there is perhaps also an idea of an experimental documentary, since we have worked a lot with video.
Do you think that photography as a means of artistic expression today is increasingly oriented towards forms of activism?
Davide Monteleone: I think it is a very widespread phenomenon in art in general. The dispute between autonomous art and political art has been going on since the time of Adorno. There are significant theories on the fact that today art perhaps is not such if it is not a form of activism. Decolonising Nature, a book by T.J. Demos, which I read recently, proposes exactly this.
Ethiopia, October 2019. Addis Ababa, workers at the Huajian Group footwear company. Huajian has a factory near Addis Ababa that employs 600 people, which opened in January 2012, and has pledged to jointly invest $2bn (£1.3bn) over the next ten years to establish a special economic zone for light manufacturing in Ethiopia, creating jobs for around 100,000 Ethiopians. The company, which employs 25,000 workers in China, plans to create around 30,000 jobs in Addis Ababa by 2022.
You once said that one of the human qualities you appreciate the most is imagination and that rather than the immediacy of events you are interested in trying to understand the world through photography. These are two characteristics that bring you very close to the vision of an artist. Do you consider yourself an artist?
Davide Monteleone: I take it as a huge compliment! It is always difficult to give definitions, which could seem presumptuous. I know that the definition of photographer has been limiting for me for some time now. Not so much to me personally, but because I believe that the semiotics of the word photography needs to be revisited, since it is no longer a simple writing of light. It has become something else. Visual artist and storyteller are perhaps the definitions that suit me best today.
What kind of equipment have you been using recently?
Davide Monteleone: I usually employ technical cameras that are used to portray architecture or landscapes with digital backs. I almost no longer use the analog ones that I used for many years. Then I make use of satellite images, data, drones, any technical tool that allows me to transform a concept, an object or landscape into an image.
How do you finance your projects today?
Davide Monteleone: I continue to collaborate with magazines, which however are no longer the primary source of support because it is a sector in crisis. Today I work mainly with foundations and institutions that support the type of projects that I do, such as the National Geographic Society and the Bezos Foundation, foundations that until now have been almost exclusively American.
In fact, I would like to take this opportunity to say hi to the Italian foundations: if they wished to give me a hand too, since I am Italian, I would be very happy! There are many private institutions in Italy that have the means to do much more to support the art world.
To end our conversation, I would like to ask you for a reading suggestion for those who are starting a career in photography today. Are there any new interesting texts that you would recommend?
Davide Monteleone: I wouldn’t say very new, but there are books that are, so to speak, historical and absolutely must reads, starting with Vilém Flusser and Ariella Azoulai, who is a bit of an heir to Susan Sontag, for everything that concerns the representation of the human being, and Lev Manovic for the aesthetics of artificial intelligence and social media.
Lanzhou New Area, China, Gansu Province. December 2017. The high-speed train connecting the New Area to the city of Lanzhou and from there to Xinjiang is seen leaving the train station. In the background the new park under construction with among others a replica of the Great Sphinx of Egypt; the Parthenon; The Summer Palace and the Forbidden City of Beijing. Lanzhou New Area is a special economic and political administration zone under the direct control of the Lanzhou municipal government established in 2012. It is located in the valley around Lanzhou Zhongchuan Airport, not far from the Yellow Rover and is the first state-level new development area in northwestern China.
Alice Traforti
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