the extractive gaze: data, soil & body
28.11.2025 - 20.12.2025 - gaat museum, lisbon - portugal 

A group exhibition featuring Fernando Moletta, Flavia Regaldo, Natália Loyola, Pedro Gramaxo, Pedro Pedrosa Fonseca, Stephanie Monica & Diogo Amorim. Curated by JP Galvão.

“I was plunged into a state of wonder and admiration. I was in the process of witnessing the unveiling of the mysteries of the subterranean world!”
— Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

Verne’s cry of discovery echoes into our present, but its meaning has shifted. The contemporary subterranean is not just a geological stratum; it is the data mine, the biological sample, the archived memory beneath the skin. We no longer journey to the centre of the earth, but into the extracted core of our own existence.

Once, on a certain winter day, I stood before a vast landscape of cliffs in southern England — surrounded by the sea, the rocks, the clouds, the soil. I was absorbed in the rawness of it, in the need to share that encounter with another: a friend, a lover, someone who would understand the quiet pull between body and earth. Like so many of us, I carried a device that extends my gaze and captures presence. That moment became not just a photograph, but a data imprint — a digital echo of an embodied experience. We are here, on this earth, and simultaneously there, in the cloud. A photograph is made; an extraction occurs.

This exhibition, The Extractive Gaze: Data, Soil & Body, explores the parallel systems of control that see both the Earth's skin and human skin as contested territories. The colonial gaze that once mapped land for extraction now operates as a biometric and corporate gaze, still a matter of war and colonization, erosion, desertification and ethnic cleanse. Our faces and fingerprints unlock devices; our gestures feed the cloud; our movements in the city are tracked; our genetic code becomes a resource for pharmaceutical empires. As theorist Shoshana Zuboff warns in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, “The goal now is to automate us.” We are the raw material. The “virtual you” is the new oil, mined, refined, and distributed through invisible circuits of power.

In this system, the gaze becomes a tool of extraction. It is the mode of looking that frames its target—be it a forest, a body of water, or a human body—as an object available for taking. The Earth’s skin is stripped of its minerals, its oil, its life — while human skin, too, is mined for data, reduced to code, image, and biometric trace. The parallel is not metaphorical but material.

In response, the artists in this exhibition propose a different kind of looking: a deeper, more attentive gaze. Here the works presented are portraits of the earth in different tones and perspectives. They engage with elemental materials—stone, sound, oil, clay, soil—and technological devices, creating connections that ask us to reconsider our relationship with these layers. The soil holds fossils, seeds, minerals — a geological memory of transformation. Our own skin holds DNA, scars, and the memory of touch and trauma —  a biological memory of intimacy and survival. 

Data is the new, quantified archive, a collective body of information stored in the earth's technological crust, a new kind of sedimentary layer: metadata as dust. We are witnessing the convergence of these archives — biological, geological, digital — forming a hybrid terrain of memory and loss.

The cloud, once a poetic metaphor for a suspended landscape and the earth’s breath, is now also a cybernetic landscape—a physical network of data centres that consumes water and energy, colonising planetary resources to sustain a digital realm.

As you move through the space, you are encouraged to listen, to observe the textures of rocks and the hum of data. Here we are invited to linger — to look longer, to feel the porousness of our presence. The earth, in its many forms, is not a passive backdrop. It steadily gazes back.

What do you see when you look at a stone? How does the oil feel on your skin? What does the smell of it cause? In a world of constant extraction, how do we move from being a resource to be mined back to being a body in reciprocal contact with the earth? What remains, perhaps, is the act of attention — the gaze that does not consume but listens, the touch that restores rather than takes.

text in portuguese