Presentation short abstract

An artistic research project exploring shared geology as basis for international solidarity, mapping North-South connections (e.g. copper deposits in Sweden and the Congo both formed via the Grenville orogeny) and their implications for place-based resistance and the politics of transition.

Presentation long abstract

This artistic research project seeks solidarities between sites of extractivism through investigation into shared geological strata, mapping connections between Global North and South to explore implications for the theory and practice of place-based resistance and the politics of transition.

Technologies of geological knowledge are unevenly distributed. In pursuit of speculative investment, purveyors of globalized extractivism deploy methods of geological exploration capable of rendering spatial data across physical strata, linking analogous deposits worldwide. What connections between disparate artistic practices, community-based projects, and sites of resistance might become legible if mapped along comparable geological layers? Can extractivist methodologies and technologies inform a counter-cartography that traces alternative networks of solidarity—material, chemical, biological—that already exist beneath the surface of disparate struggles and infrastructures?

Taking as a speculative case study the Hennes Bay copper mining project in the Swedish region of Dalsland, which the company Arctic Minerals reports shares pedigree with existing deposits at Kamoa-Kakula and Tenke-Fungurumi (Congo) and other sites associated with the Grenville orogeny, we ask how international solidarities informed by similar geological connections might affect the politics of extraction and resistance in diverse contexts.

Across multiple scales of regulatory process, imbalances in information about land use, energy use, and the broader economics of infrastructure mirror uneven access to geospatial data. Moving from ground to cloud, the question “Where do critical minerals come from?” prompts a further question—“Where are they going to?”—which suggests a fundamental incompatibility between ‘decarbonisation-transition’ and ‘military-security’ justifications for accelerated extractivism.