Lens
Material
What is it made from, where did those materials come from, and what did their production cost?
On this lens
Material is the least sentimental way in. Before an object means anything it is a quantity of something taken from somewhere, and that taking has a price paid by a landscape or a body. Read this lens as an accounting.
Reading sequence
A metal, a tree, a mollusc secretion, a grain, and the market that moves all four. The sequence descends from the most extracted to the most self-renewing.
- 01CR-0002SilverThe most reflective and most conductive of the metals, and soft enough that pure silver cannot hold an edge or a shape. Everything usable is a compromise with copper.
- 02CR-0006Spanish CedarLight for its strength, with oils that repel insects — the reason it lines cigar rooms, canoes, and drawers.
- 03CR-0001Freshwater PearlsNacre laid down in microscopic layers by a mollusc responding to an irritant. The colour is not pigment but interference — light caught between sheets of aragonite. Freshwater pearls are almost entirely nacre, which is why they survive being worn daily.
- 04CR-0003MasaCooking maize in slaked lime dissolves the pericarp and releases bound niacin. The chemistry is why maize could become a staple instead of a deficiency.
- 05CR-0004Belén MarketTimber, corrugated sheet, plastic tarp, and river water. Half the structures are built to be lifted or lost when the water rises five metres.