Museums and mining technologies

ABSTRACT

This article has a twofold purpose, first to explore how the founding of museums helps the mining industry to create a new way to look at what becomes natural in landscapes that are intervened by mining operations, and second to analyze how this new way of looking at the landscape ignites a process of recontextualization having a material impact on the territories. As part of this discussion, this article reveals how the technologies of mining production have evolved, facilitating the companies’ material production, and how the mining museum becomes a fundamental part of this technological development. This article looks at two mining museums owned or funded by the Chilean copper mine Los Pelambres, the ‘Museum of Copper and Sustainable Development’, located in Los Vilos next to Los Chungungos dock, and the ‘Andróniko Luksic Mining Center’, located in the engineering department at the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago. These museums are funded by the mining company Los Pelambres and one of them is currently managed by the company.

KEYWORDS:

• Mining
• extractivism
• museum
• corporate museum
• mediation
• Chile

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Karla Palma is an Assistant Professor at the Universidad de Chile. Previously, she worked as a journalist and activist in issues related to communication and environmental issues in Chile. She received her PhD in Communications and Media at the Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 2015.

Notes

1 Los Pelambres is part of the Antofagasta Minerals Holding and is the seventh biggest copper mine in the world. Its zones of operations are located in the Andes close to the Argentinian border, but the whole extractive process takes over the Choapa Valley from the mountains to the Pacific Ocean, where the copper concentrate is collected from the transportation pipe and dehydrated in the bay of Los Vilos, whereupon the mineral is shipped from Los Chungungos port to the rest of the world.

2 Los Pelambres also sponsors activities at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which has served as a center for teaching and learning for generations of Chilean artists; and designed the Park Monte Aranda, located in the Pupío Valley (next to Choapa Valley), which in the form of an open-air exhibition displays all the pre-Hispanic artifacts that the company removed from the community of El Mauro, where Los Pelambres built Latin America's largest tail-dam. For this study, I opted not to focus on either of these, considering that the Museum of Contemporary Art is an institution with a longer tradition going beyond the intervention of Los Pelambres and where the company's intervention is narrowed to specific events. In the case of Park Monte Aranda, by the time of the study, the park was not open to the public. However, these sites might be considered in a future study that goes beyond the scope of the present project.

3 RedEAmerica was initiated in 2002 with the support of the Inter-American Foundation, an independent agency of the US government.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Vicerrectoría de Investigación, Universidad de Chile [grant number UI-002/17].