“X” marks the what? “Cross influence”, extractivism, and the labours of moving image excavation in Harun Farocki’s The Silver and the Cross (2010)

Harun Farocki’s 2010 video installation The Silver and the Cross (Das Silber and das Kreuz) presents a “soft montage” of Gaspar Miguel de Berrío’s 1758 painting of the Cerro Rico Mountain and surrounding city of Potosí in contrast to contemporary footage of the same region shot in present-day Bolivia. Questions of extraction (or, more specifically, extractivism) and histories of representation abound in relation to intersecting networks of capitalism, Christianity, and colonialism on the Latin American continent—and the depredations of the imperial silver mining trade in particular. This article situates Farocki’s moving image practice within the broader media and technological genealogies and logics of extractivism. The importance of “soft montage” or “cross influence”, a signature of his later œuvre, to this kind of investigation is paramount. Farocki’s analysis sees the juxtaposition of close-up, tracking shots, and static shots of Berrío’s landscape to dwell on the class and racial hierarchies that might