The Observers’ Plateaus drawings were first presented in the exhibition Compulsive Desires – Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains at Galeria Municipal do Porto in 2023. According to curator Marina Otero Verzier, the series illustrates “the effects of Western rationalism and scientific disciplines that transform the living ecosystem of a mountain into a succession of geo-historical transitions.”

The deliberate imprecision of this abstract and “simplistic” work—which could be read as drawing, acrylic painting, or even a sketch for sculpture or installation—challenges conventional definitions of stratification and sedimentation within positivist science, especially when framed by the discourse of extractivism and new epistemologies.

Later, researcher Lucie Fortuin visited my studio, where I introduced her to The Observers’ Plateaus and the possibility of rotating the images. For me, this inversion is not only a physical gesture but also a rhetorical one. In her article Grijze tijd, published in the Dutch journal Metropolis M, Fortuin interprets this rhetorical gesture as highlighting “negative mountains” that represent voids caused by mining, concluding that “geological time is also political.”

The multiplicity of interpretations in The Observers’ Plateaus — such as its inversion into “POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE MOUNTAINS,” illustrated below in the postcards — expands the discourse on landscape intervention.