Alfredo Jaar is a Chilean-born artist and filmmaker based in the US, whose work explores socio-political issues, and focuses on human rights, conflict and power structures. He is known for his public interventions and thought-provoking installations that challenge viewers to confront uncomfortable truths. His latest site-specific work, The End of the World, reflects on the long-term effects of large-scale mining of metals and the struggle for resources on our ailing planet.
I thought one day I would like to do a little work that contains the world.
The installation is centred around a cube made up of ten thin slithers of metal, including lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper, that are essential to our technological needs. Jaar’s works have been shown in prestigious exhibitions worldwide, including the Venice Biennale where he represented Chile in 2013 and the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2024.
In the vast hall of KINDL’s Kesselhaus, you’ve placed an incredibly small installation, with an illuminated cube made up of thin layers of metals and minerals at its centre. Were you aiming to confound people?
When you enter the space you enter a new cosmology, and that little cube stands for the planet itself. It’s so minuscule, and then you realise how in danger we are because of our irresponsibility and our criminality. Governments and corporations don’t give a damn about the degradation of the environment.
Why did you decide to make it a 4x4x4cm cube?
I began by studying every exhibition that happened in that space before me. Most artists respond by doing a gigantic work; I wanted to take a contrarian strategy and avoid seeing the space as tyrannical, as something I needed to beat. Secondly, this problem is so complex that I didn’t think that by doing a big work, I would resolve it. So, I went the other way and tried to concentrate on the issue and to make it so minimal that the emptiness, the silence and the red light give that little cube gravitas. If you were to show the same cube in a normal gallery space with regular light, it becomes an object.
The work’s title couldn’t be more dramatic…
Of course, some people might see it as melodramatic. But I wanted to provoke a serious thought about what’s happening to this collapsing planet. There is a lot of denial around what the next generation is going to have to live through…
What has been the reaction to the work?
I was very surprised to discover that a lot of people walking into the space have started crying. I don’t know if it was the church-like aspect, the silence, the red light, or from understanding what it means.
The work comes with a booklet by the political geologist Adam Bobbette, which reveals the social and economic ramifications of large-scale mining on countries in the Global South. Faced with such incredible complexity, was boiling it down to a cube the only approach you felt you could take?
Each essay is just the tip of the iceberg on the effects of mining these metals. I’ve always believed in the power of a single idea. As an artist, I always thought that less is more and I am someone who edits down, edits, edits, edits. For me, each work must follow the model of the Haiku: to say the maximum with the minimum. So, I’ve always tried to follow that and to reduce it but still contain all the complexity of what I’m trying to say.
Were you worried that people could be underwhelmed by the mini cube?
I never studied art, and I’ve always had a certain degree of uncertainty when I present a new project. So, yes, I thought people might dismiss it and think it was a joke. But I thought, “Alfredo, you have failed before. You’re going to fail again. What the hell!” Because I’m an architect, I’m interested in minimalism, and I’m interested in a certain type of artwork, and there are many references in the history of art that influenced me, like Piero Manzoni’s Base of the World.
It’s a bronze rectangle sitting on the ground in a city near Copenhagen. It’s inscribed but it’s upside down, so you have to turn around to read it, and then you realise that Manzoni was suggesting that the world is resting on this little piece of bronze, transforming the entire world into a work of art. These are works I consider masterpieces. And I thought one day I would like to do a little work that contains the world also. And maybe someday someone will think that this little cube belongs to that marvellous genealogy…
One of the slithers in the cube is made up of rare earth elements – a resource essential to smartphones, tablets, and laptops. It is made up of 17 chemically similar metals. How did you produce this?
Rare earths are always mixed with other compounds. Sometimes it’s just a liquid, sometimes it’s just a powder, but it needs to be produced with another metal. That took up a lot of time. I could have faked it and done a fake little cube, but I had an almost spiritual need to make it the real thing.
Each one is there, sometimes 100% pure, sometimes mixed with another metal to achieve the right shape. A lot of times we couldn’t obtain it in the amounts we wanted, so we had to buy a minimum of one kilo. People thought we were crazy: “What are you going to do with 200 grams of lithium?” It’s why it has taken us about three years to compile them all.
In one of his essay, Bobbette states that every smartphone contains cobalt mined using child labour. At the same time, visitors are pulling out their phones to take pictures…
And even then some people won’t see it as ironic. We are caught in a system, in a train, and we don’t know how to stop it. Hopefully this cube causes a little crack. But it cannot go much further, I don’t have a solution. I’m just pointing out some facts; it’s up to you to read them however you can.
There is a lot of denial around what the next generation is going to have to live through.
The work also highlights the hypocrisy of the green transition, the sense that we feel we’re doing the right thing by changing to lithium batteries and driving electric cars, when in reality this comes at the expense of countries from the Global South and the habitats of indigenous communities…
I mean, the only answer possible to this is a truly radical lifestyle change. And I don’t think we’re capable of that. I cannot see how it’s possible. So that’s why I don’t see light at the end of the tunnel. It is our children who will suffer the consequences.
Why did you decide to protect the cube behind glass?
It’s the aspect I like least. But we couldn’t resolve the security issue any other way. There was no way to glue it and I didn’t want to make a hole and to screw it to the base. Sometimes you have to compromise.
I ask because with your work The Silence of Nduwayezu (1997), which features one million slides depicting the haunted eyes of a five-year-old Tutsi boy who witnessed the murder of his parents during the Rwandan War in 1994, you allowed visitors to take slides with them…
I became aware of it when the curator called me into the guards’ cabin. On the cameras, we could see the people taking them, but from their body language it did not look like stealing. They were moved. I didn’t define it at the time, but later I thought maybe it’s a kind of memento that they wanted to keep. So I let it go.
We make an agreement with insurance companies every time we show the work to refund the missing slides. And so, we always start with a million, and by now there are more than 175,000 slides of the eyes of Nduwayezu in private homes around the world. And it means something, because I was fighting with rage against the indifference of the world during this genocide.
Your work often feels like a response to indifference, confronting a society and media that chooses to present a sanitised version of what’s happening in the world…
Gramsci once said a beautiful thing: “I hate the indifferent.” And I always identify with that, and I also identify with another Gramsci quote, when he talks about the pessimism of his intelligence and the optimism of his will. That’s how I feel in the world. It is my will that keeps me going. My intellect is extremely pessimistic in these dark times. I am on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I think we’ve been completely failed by our politicians. I don’t think things have ever been darker in the world than they are right now.
That’s a powerful statement, especially considering your escape from Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. Do you think this ultimately reflects the failure of Western governments?
The so-called Western world doesn’t represent more than 13% of the world population. And right now, 87% of the world is thinking in very different ways. And the world is practically divided into two camps: the G7 and the BRICS. The rest of the world, what we call the Global South, is with the BRICS. The so-called global rules-based order from the Western world is a complete failure, and that failure has been demonstrated in the last few years.
I escaped Chile because of censorship, among other reasons. Now in the Western world, we are going through an enormous amount of censorship. There are certain words that cannot be said, there are certain countries that cannot be mentioned. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I would escape the Pinochet regime and 50 years later see censorship again in the so-called free world. I’ve never seen things as dark as I see them now. And this is from someone who witnessed the genocide in Rwanda, surrounded by corpses rotting in the sun.
- The End of the World through Jun 1, 2025 at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Am Sudhaus 3, Neukölln, details.
