As part of our research on wildlife conservation in South Africa and the colonial biases still intertwined within the Western idea of nature, we developed Territorial Machines. The work is composed of a series of photographs taken during various trips to South Africa, culminated in an exhibition curated by Arnold Braho.
As he writes: “Territorial Machines: Extracting Nature […] refers to the concept of territorial machines, which is to say, macrostructures capable of codifying organic, human and animal life, but also of producing a certain type of territory composed of a set of signs, practices and habits that organise time and space. With its neo-liberal roots, this system is analysed here by The Cool Couple in a context of wilderness, and in particular in the South African context, where the animal industry, privatisation and the extraction of value from nature, blend the notion of wildlife conservation with market logics. The current contradictions express a range of controversies: on the one hand a practice that has made South Africa the country with the most biodiversity in the world, thanks to the proliferation of a huge number of wild animals, with, on the other hand the total reconstruction of an idea of nature as private property and commodity for trade. The principle of conservation is thus totally relegated to its mere use: it is commodification, in fact, that assures the survival of animal species. From the end of Fordism onwards, nature has been progressively incorporated by capital, articulating itself as a consequence into techniques for the preservation of fauna, and thus shifting production from machines to living bodies. Today, the techniques applied by so-called territorial machines are immaterial, structural and invisible, and represent the ability to extract value; in this case from animal life forms. It is precisely the idea of wild nature and the way it changes within our imagination that is staged by The Cool Couple in Territorial Machines: Extracting Nature. If lions, elephants, rhinos, impalas and wildebeests, to name but a few, play the role of luxury goods managed by private or public parties, how has our way of visualising the animal world changed? Making use of photography conceived as a form of secretly spying, able to establish a circumstantial paradigm but also allowing the deciphering of an opaque reality, The Cool Couple analyses the structures of privatisation of South African wildlife. The images displayed present a geography of fences, walls and capture systems of so-called territorial machines, but also the collective image that these same devices present online. Some of the images were produced through the use of artificial intelligence (AI), with the aim of reconstructing an archaeology of domestication, particularly of the wild”.