Ahmad Ghaddar (Renoz) - “Artwork Statement – “Untitled” (from the project “Imperial Footprints”)

This work was created using pigment sourced from different materials collected from Barcelona. The main pigment is manganese dioxide, a material commonly used in dry-cell batteries, which I collected from the street. Manganese dioxide is a material commonly extracted from various countries in the African continent. The photo reference used is one that I found online from a company specialized in extracting minerals based in Lusaka, Zambia.

“Imperial footprints”, as a project, traces back material footprints to their original sources. The visual representation is only a reflection on the different parts of the imperial cycle, war-expansion of empire, colonization- extractive practices and militarization.

The work is part of a broader inquiry into how physical remnants of an empire, embedded in European cities, act as silent witnesses to histories of extraction, violence, and displacement. This work, like others in “Imperial Footprints”, investigates the memory of these materials and finds a visual representation for this memory.