Imperial Blue is a powerful installation that uses empty containers of glyphosate, the agrochemical emblematic of industrial soybean production, to dismantle the hegemonic discourse of progress. The containers, originally nondescript, are elevated to the status of unwitting monuments to an extractivist economic model that sustains its wealth at the cost of systematically poisoning the land and life.

The accumulation of this waste creates a toxic landscape that is, at the same time, a critique of monoculture. The colour blue, historically associated with nobility, power, purity and transcendence (imperial blue), is brutally inverted to become the emblem of pollution and ecological degradation. This chromatic inversion underscores the hypocrisy inherent in a system that dresses up its violence with the promise of prosperity.

The work reveals the latent violence in everyday objects. By shifting the technical language of agriculture to that of necropolitics—the control over who should live and who should die—Rodríguez exposes how the productive model becomes a mechanism of exclusion and disease. The installation forces us to look beyond the function of the container to confront its result: destruction.

In the tension between industrial form and toxic waste, Imperial Blue transforms these remnants of extractivism into material witnesses to a modernity in profound ethical and ecological crisis. The artist urges us to stop perceiving the landscape as a mere backdrop for exploitation and to recognise it as a wounded body whose scars are the very waste products of our consumption and production.

Victor Lopez Zumelzu