Through the Filth

The Peruvian Guano Trade was a significant time in history for Chinese and Irish indentured servants during the 19th century, who were forcibly moved from their native lands and put to work in horrendous pits of guano, seabird excrement. Many laborers took their own lives by jumping into these pits. Their bodies now integrated inside the landscape they forcibly found themselves in. This same guano is exported to America where it helped grow our food and regenerate our soil during the Industrial Revolution.

The American landscape is quite literally made out of the bodies of indentured servants in a process called racial sedimentation, coined by Tao Leigh Goffe.

I use archival images from 19th century photographer, Henry DeWitt Moulton who personally visited the Chincha Islands in 1864 and created an entire book of photographic negatives. He romanticized the workers experiences and blended them into the landscape that ended up being their fate, and even titled his work "Rays of Sunlight from South America."

Using a 360 camera inside a flatbed scanner, I re-contextualize the guano trade, making landscapes of my own that continue to flatten, compress, and distort their bodies using current technology.

This is my expanded documentary on the history of the Peruvian Guano Trade.