A-CROSS
BYRON GAGO
Archive · 2017
A-CROSS is an ongoing photographic research project documenting the infrastructure of the oil industry in the Amazon forest of Ecuador: pipelines, extraction facilities and their attendant architecture. The photographs were made across four of Ecuador's five Amazonian provinces, and that geographic spread is the argument: the oil industry shown not as scattered sites but as a single, networked presence operating throughout the region, and by extension across Latin America. The infrastructure stands as both evidence of a continuous expansion and a symptom of the radical transformation of Amazonian ways of life. Behind the exhibited selection sits a larger archive of photographs and video from the field.
The network is built in the editing, not in any single frame. A pipe in Sucumbíos, a pump in Orellana, a flare in Pastaza are separate photographs; read in sequence and across geography, they argue that this is one infrastructural body distributed over the provinces. The claim lives between the images rather than inside any one of them. The exhibited selection foregrounds that systemic reading; the larger archive behind it holds the texture, the repetition and the variation. The two are different registers: the sequence is the argument, the archive is the evidence.
The methodology is uncomfortable to state plainly, and stating it is part of the work: I went where I could go, photographed what I could photograph, and returned where it was safe to return. The political economy of access shaped what is in the work as much as the political economy of extraction did. Whatever separates this from photojournalism is not formal. It is duration (the field has been returned to over years, where journalism rarely can) and destination (the archive is made for slow institutional time, not for tomorrow's headline). The work does not claim to be doing something other than slow witness simply because it hangs in a different room.
The early silence (to photograph the apparatus and refuse the slogan, reading the infrastructure as symptom) was a strategic stance, useful when the work first circulated in contexts where slogans had been worn smooth. Ten years on, the silence reads as neutrality, and neutrality reads as endorsement. So the archive has to be placed inside its own moment: the long aftermath of Texaco and Chevron, the Yasuní referendum, the Indigenous defenders killed across these same provinces. The pictures of pipe and flare are not neutral documents; they are the visible surface of a history the infrastructure was built to outlast.
"The work does not document Amazonian communities directly; it documents the apparatus that transforms them. This is a formal choice with ethical implications that remain unexamined."
Critical review, 2026
The choice is deliberate, and its cost is real. The communities (Cofán, Siona, Secoya, Waorani, Kichwa and others across the four provinces) were not photographable from the position I occupied; to move through that landscape with a camera asks for permissions, relations and time I had not earned, and to photograph anyway would have been the extractive gesture the work is trying to refuse. So the apparatus is shown and the communities are named in the text, which leaves the abstraction of "Amazonian ways of life" doing the moral labour. I have not yet found the form that holds the apparatus and the community in one frame without instrumentalising either. The gap is honest; it is not resolved.
A-CROSS
2017
Photographic archive
- Photography — ongoing field research
- Oil infrastructure · Ecuadorian Amazon
01 / 04
A-CROSS is field research before it is exhibition. Across four Amazonian provinces (Sucumbíos, Orellana, Pastaza and beyond), the artist returned over years to photograph extraction infrastructure where it could be reached, building a deposit of photographs and video far larger than any hung selection. The exhibited work is a sequence cut from that deposit to make the systemic argument; the archive behind it holds the field's texture, its repetition and its variation. They are two different objects: the sequence is the claim, the archive is the evidence.
The territories the infrastructure crosses are the homelands of the Cofán, Siona, Secoya, Waorani and Kichwa peoples, among others. They are named in the work's text precisely because they are absent from its images. The decision not to photograph them is the work's hardest line: a refusal to make a second extraction of the people the first extraction is already transforming. It leaves the work deliberately incomplete, waiting for a form that does not yet exist.
This is the artist's own region, and A-CROSS is the early root of a long preoccupation that runs through the practice: the same territory and the same extraction return, years later, in Manonegra. As an archive it is built for slow institutional time rather than the news cycle: a counter-map assembled patiently and kept open, closer in its patience to a long act of witness than to a finished statement.
A-CROSS
2017
Field / archive
- Field documentation
- Four Amazonian provinces · 2017–
01 / 04
