Lorenzo Poli | Geoglyphs of Our Time | 2025 Winner of Life Framer's Series Award
September 11, 2025
The Geoglyphs of Our Time looks at the issue of resource mining in South America. Lorenzo Poli photographs open-pit mines that have left very deep marks on the face of the earth. It’s not easy to conceptualize the sheer amount of ground hollowed out by extraction. But in his photographs, we start to feel it. Humans have built things of an extraordinary scale, and Poli shows our ability to dismantle at an equally formidable level. As an architect who worked for years building with materials from the earth, he now turns directly to the source of raw materials. This work stares down into the pit, to try to understand what’s been taken and what we prioritize in modern civilization.
The project circles around one shape — the inverted cone, the gouge in the earth. The land has been scooped out in almost mythic proportions, carving something like an inverse pyramid into the ground, a monument to our unquenchable appetites. An image of the Chuquicamata mine in Chile is printed on fabric and hung from the ceiling to the floor. The photograph looks down into the chasm from above, but the viewer takes this in from the side, with a feeling of vertigo. We could fall right in.
Poli’s visual language runs parallel to that of magical realism and gives the series a unique depth and communicative power. The foundation of his photographs are depictions of reality, but they are seamlessly paired with allegorical concepts.
In Pieter Breugel’s 16th century illustration, (installed in the window of the gallery) the tower of Babel has not yet collapsed. Workers are still carting bricks up the tower, and the harbor below is bustling. Bruegel’s depiction captures one of humanity’s oldest stories: the attempt to build a monument so high it could reach the heavens. Yet the tower goes against the will of God and collapses into rubble and confusion. The people are divided into many languages and can no longer understand each other. It’s a vivid picture of a society blindly trusting in the unbridled possibilities of technology. The open-pit mines in Poli’s photographs echo the shape of the tower, with similar patterns of spiraling expansion. Tiny trucks can be seen carting minerals up and down the spiral.
Turn the Tower of Babel upside down, and there is the shape of Dante Alighieri’s inferno. Poli floats a large scale diagram of the architecture of hell in front of his photograph of the Sierra Gorda Copper Mine. Hell could easily fit into the circular pit, like a screw drilling into the hole and sealing it off. The copper mine, in use only since 2014, is inhabited by the trucks seen working in concentric circles at every level. It appears that humans really are building the inferno, with our own drive, hands, ingenuity, and greed.
- Mia Dalglish + Lisa Woodward
Lorenzo Poli is the 2025 Winner of Life Framer’s prestigious Series Award, juried by Mia Dalglish + Lisa Woodward. The corresponding solo exhibition is on view at at Pictura Gallery September 5 — November 31
See more of Lorenzo’s full exhibition HERE
Learn more about Life Framer and the Series Award HERE
