Welcome to the symposium «Extraction and Aesthetics: Pasts, Currents, Futures» at the Jøssingfjord Science Museum, 13-14 September. The symposium is organized by the research project “How Norway Made the World Whiter” (NorWhite) in collaboration with Velferden Center for Contemporary Art.
The symposium is organized in connection to the research exhibition 'Campaign!' at Jøssingfjord Science Museum and the research exhibition ‘Hidden Stone’ at Velferden.
Programme
Friday 13. September 2024
Symposium day 1 at Jøssingfjord Science Museum
The symposium will be live-streamed.
Zoom- link:
Meeting ID: 681 4053 6535
Password: 91p7VKAw
10:00 Welcome by Ingrid Halland
10:15 Introduction by Tonje Haugland Sørensen, PhD, Senior Researcher in the NorWhite project, the University of Bergen
11:00 – 11:45 Speaker 1: Karen Pinkus, professor at Cornell University, US, author of the book Subsurface (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary (University of Minnesota Press, 2016)
Title: “Extraction without Extraction: A Beautiful Dream”
I ask us to engage in a thought experiment about the “dream” of having resources made available, present on the surface, without the difficult labor or problematic practices of mining, quarrying, disturbing "mother earth" or speeding up natural processes, which have led to so much ambivalence about extraction from prehistory to speculative futures. What would it mean to think with this dream (beyond a superficial techno-optimism or naive ecologism)?
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch at Jøssingfjord Science Museum
13:00 – 13:45 Speaker 2: Siobhan Angus, historian and curator and author of the book Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke University Press, 2024)
Title: “Photography from the Deep: Image-Making and Resource Extraction”
Challenging the emphasis on immateriality in discourses on photography, this talk focuses on the inextricable links between image-making and resource extraction, revealing how mining is a precondition of photography. Photography begins underground and, in photographs of mines and mining, frequently returns there. Through a materials-driven analysis of visual culture, I illustrate histories of colonization, labor, and environmental degradation to explore the ways in which photography is enmeshed within and enables global extractive capitalism. Reading materiality alongside representation and visual form reveals a complex picture of photography’s implication within extractive capitalism and, in turn, its potential to resist it.
14:00 – 14:45 Speaker 3: Patrick Anthony, Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at Uppsala universitet, Sweden, author of the forthcoming book Unearthed: Science and Environment Across Mineral Frontiers
Title: “Terraforming tableaux and the tracing of global capitalism”
This talk uses a key extractive technology—the vertical profile map, or tableau—to re-trace the history of global mineral capitalism at the dawn of the modern era. This particular “art of extraction” illuminates decisive connections across world geographies, linking Latin American and Central Europe regimes of mining, labor, and war-capitalism at the turn of the nineteenth century. While opening material histories of connections as yet captured in metaphors of global capitalism’s “flowering” and “restless relocation,” tableaux also reveal the pictorial and discursive production of world-systemic thinking, specifically the notion of a global mineral economy that, I argue, was polemically crafted by liberal activists like Alexander von Humboldt. Returning to the tracery of global capitalism in tabular sciences, this talk seeks to disrupt the nineteenth-century logic of “peaceful conquest” that persists today in the new hegemony of “green capitalism.”
15:00 – 16:00 Coffee, fruits, snacks, and guided tour in the exhibition “Campaign!” by Ingrid Halland
16:00 – 16:30 Speaker 4: Velferden – Center for Contemporary Arts, by Maiken Stene and Hans Edward Hammons
16:30 – 17:15 Speaker 5: Stephanie O’ Rourke, Senior Lecturer in art history at University of St Andrews, Scotland, author of Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2024)
Title: “Landscapes from Below: Romanticism and Mineral Extraction”
This talk explores the conditions of visibility that were created in and through closed-pit mining in early nineteenth-century Europe, as well as the challenges they posed for traditional landscape conventions. I focus on German landscapes but also consider a range of technical diagrams from the broader European context.
17:30 – 18:30 Break
18:30 Dinner at Jøssingfjord Science Museum (for invited guests)
Saturday 14. September 2024
Symposium day 2 at Velferden Center for Contemporary Art
11.30 – 11:45 Introduction to the exhibition ‘Hidden Stone’ by Marte Johnslien
11:45 – 12:30 Lunch at Velferden
12:30 – 13:30 Artists talks by participants at SANDSKOLEN (‘The Sandschool’): Siri Austeen, Stefan Schröder, Agnes Mohlin, Naomi Fisher, Maiken Stene and Hans Edward Hammonds
13:30 – 16:00 Workshop in groups with field walks and performance by Marie Ronold Mathisen and John Derek Bishop
16:00 Bus departure from Velferden to Stavanger (reserve a seat by contacting us)
18:00 Arrival in Stavanger
Visuals for the symposium are created by Maximilian Schob and shows the transformed landscapes of the Tellnes mine in Jøssingfjord. Poster design: Exutoire.