Format/Structure

How might place-based resistance movements across Global North-South divides be linked by recognition of shared bedrock geologies? A participatory workshop bringing together diverse expertise to collectively map geological, infrastructural, and ecological connections across sites of extractivism.

Long Abstract

This workshop invites diverse practitioners to collaboratively map connections between global sites of extractivism along shared geological substrata. Geological Solidarities is an artistic research project that appropriates industry methods of speculation to trace alternative networks of solidarity—material, chemical, biological—that already exist beneath the surface of disparate struggles. We approach solidarity as both an affective grounding and a prescription for action: a feeling as well as a politics, a sense of connection and coordination rooted not in cultural affinity or proximity, but in shared geological substrate.

Technologies of geological knowing are unevenly distributed. Purveyors of globalised extractivism use spatial data across geological strata to link analogous formations worldwide, drawing geological analogies to attract speculative investment. If companies mining sites in Sweden can claim affinities to known deposits and mining projects on other continents, what connections between dispersed (artistic) practices, community-based projects, and sites of resistance might become legible if mapped along comparable geological layers?

Join us to help map these connections. Bring your situated expertise from research, fieldwork, activism, policy, artistic practice, or community engagement as the primary material. Together we will ask what it means to treat place not as a static background to human action but as a process—and whether the recognition of shared ground, literal and otherwise, might reshape the politics of extraction, resistance, and transition across the very different contexts we each inhabit.

No geological knowledge required.