The mountain of Tindaya (Fuerteventura, Canary Islands) is the inner part of a now eroded volcano, some 20 million years old. In 1979, a local amateur archaeologist discovered hundreds of indigenous engravings near the top. Further studies confirmed the importance of the archeological site, and the centrality of the mountain for the maho people that inhabited the island before it was colonised by Spain in the 15th Century.

As a result, the mountain was listed as an Asset of Cultural Interest in 1985. Soon after it was also listed as a Natural Monument, due to its environmental singularity. Despite its “protected” status, however, the state also granted mining licenses which resulted in three quarries where the mountain’s rock was extracted.

How is it possible that the state institutions both protected the mountain and allowed rock extraction from it? It could be an instance of institutional incompetence, even negligence. But it could also be the case that this duplicity reflects a logic of separation, or “purification”,¹ at the centre of the modern Western State. The latter’s distribution of reality into airtight domains such as culture, economy or nature, each associated to separate and independent administrative bodies working in parallel, made it possible that Tindaya was simultaneously protected and exploited within the law. The resulting “partitioned mountain” is but an instance of the ontology of the “moderns”;² an ontology in which nature, culture, economy, energy, education, security, health, etc. are distinct domains, with their own legal regimes and managed by different teams of experts and/or bureaucrats.

1. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.
2. Latour, Bruno, ed. Reset Modernity! Cambridge, MA: MIT Press / ZKM Karlsruhe, 2016.