Ana Alenso, born in 1982 in Venezuela, lives and works in Berlin. Her practice, informed by extensive field research, explores global dependencies on natural resources and the forms of exploitation that arise from them. Drawing on scientific studies and exchanges with activists, she examines concrete case studies such as the oil industry and gold extraction in Latin America, as well as their impact on territories and communities.

Through assemblages, installations, videos, and photographs, her work investigates the conflicts and paradoxes rooted in petrocultures. Her practice is distinguished by a particular attention to materiality, ecology, and the use of post-industrial elements.

For several years, she has conducted field visits to mines and industrial complexes in Venezuela, Chile, Ghana, and Germany, giving rise to the long-term project Archives of the Planetary Mines. She recently exhibited at the Centro de Arte La Regenta, Gran Canaria (2023), Kunstverein Arnsberg, Germany (2024), and Galeria Abra, Caracas (2025).

More about Ana

Lo que la mina te da, la mina te quita (What mines gives, mines takes)

Gold, copper, diamonds, and coltan. Resources can be a curse. Mining is a metaphor for the erosion of humanity on an existential level. Ana Alenso’s installation explores the connection between resource wealth and the negative consequences of their exploitation. Here, addressing gold mining, she presents a sculptural landscape in which the mechanisms and consequences of mining are revealed as self-destructive signs of a civilization driven by profit. The contradictions and uncertainties caused by economic turmoil and the constant export of resources are translated into the exhibition space in an aesthetic and tactile manner; the machine becomes sculpture.

Titled Lo que la mina te da, la mina te quita (2020), the installation takes the form of an immersive environment composed of industrial materials, salvaged fragments, and elements evoking artisanal machines. Pipes, buckets, metal structures, and organic elements come together to form an unstable apparatus—both active and failing—that recalls the makeshift constructions used in certain mining operations in Latin America.

Countries such as Venezuela are particularly affected by the “resource curse,” a term coined in 1993 by Richard Auty to describe the phenomenon whereby an abundance of natural resources paradoxically leads to poverty. This only reinforces the fact that, in the Latin American context, raw materials extraction policy is shaped by a network of power structures rooted in a colonial past. Drawing on extensive research into gold mining in the Amazonian regions of Venezuela, the work highlights a central paradox: the abundance of resources does not guarantee prosperity, but can generate instability, dependency, and destruction. Soil and water pollution, the exploitation of workers, and the marginalization of local communities bear witness to the lasting impacts of these practices.

Through this installation, Ana Alenso offers a critical reflection on contemporary extractivist logics and our global dependence on natural resources, viewed as a system that is both productive and profoundly destructive.

Slow Burn

Ana Alenso’s Slow Burn is part of a critical exploration of the narratives surrounding oil extraction and the wealth it generates. While the profits from oil extraction seem to offer almost infinite wealth to certain powerful extraction territories, often located in the Global South, these areas remain largely invisible. These spaces, though at the heart of the global energy system, appear as zones of marginalization where the social and environmental consequences of extractivism accumulate.

Working within the Venezuelan context, deeply shaped by the oil economy, Ana Alenso collects fragments: car parts, engines, metal structures. These elements, once functional, are reconfigured into suspended forms, akin to mobiles. By diverting them from their original purpose, the artist disrupts their utilitarian logic and reveals their residual dimension. Extractivism no longer appears merely as a system of production, but as a machine for generating waste.

In Slow Burn, these post-industrial materials are set in motion through a slow choreography. This contrasting sense of time, in stark contrast to the acceleration associated with fossil fuels, invites a different kind of attention. The title evokes slow combustion, referring to a diffuse, gradual, and often imperceptible violence. This notion of “slow violence,” developed by researcher Rob Nixon, refers to processes of degradation that unfold over time and escape immediate visibility: pollution, contamination, and resource depletion.

By suspending these fragments in a fragile equilibrium, the work creates a space for pause and reflection. It invites us to slow down, to perceive the rhythms of the world differently, and to recognize the lasting consequences of our energy systems. Slow Burn thus becomes a material meditation on the traces left by fossil capitalism, and on the need to rethink our relationships with resources and territories.

Offshore

Offshore is a sculpture consisting of a steel oil barrel lid, held in place by a clamping ring; its standardized diameter of 57 cm immediately evokes global production and trade. With its formal simplicity, the object seems almost mundane, but it actually encapsulates an entire economic and political system tied to the extraction of fossil fuels.

This work is part of the Island Innovator series, in which Ana Alenso explores the physical and emotional experience of offshore oil environments. The platforms, visible from the ports, exert an ambivalent fascination: they are both impressive for their scale, their ceaseless activity, and their technological power, and deeply unsettling due to their ecological impact and extractive violence.

With Offshore, Alenso performs a subtle shift: she isolates a fragment of this industry to turn it into an autonomous, almost sculptural object. This act of extraction and recontextualization interrupts the object’s utilitarian function and allows us to view it differently. The lid thus becomes a surface, a membrane, a symbolic boundary between the interior, oil, a buried, invisible substance, and the exterior, the social and economic world that depends on its extraction.

The work thus explores the relationship between human bodies and technological systems. The machines that drill into the earth to extreme depths are not external to us: they extend desires and logics of production and accumulation that are deeply rooted in our societies. By blurring the boundaries between subject and object, between human and infrastructure, Offshore suggests that these technical devices are also a reflection of a collective will, inscribed in the very matter of the objects that surround us.