World of MatterContemporary Resource Ecologies

A collaborative art and media project by international artists and theorists

January 2013

World of Matter: Contemporary Resource Ecologies

The international research, exhibition, and online media project investigates natural resources

(fossil, mineral, maritime, land) and the complex ecologies of which they are a part. Initiated

by an interdisciplinary group of artists and scholars, World of Matter responds to the urgent

need for new forms of representation that shift resource-related debates from a market driven

domain to open platforms for engaged public discourse. By connecting visual documents of

illicit gold mining in the Amazon basin with video files about Egyptian land use politics or

Indian cotton farmers, it aims to activate a variety of possible readings about global flows and

histories between these sites. Ultimately, World of Matter seeks to develop innovative and

ethical approaches to the handling of resources, while at the same time challenging the very

assumption that the planet’s materials are inevitably a resource for human consumption.

Humans have exhausted virtually all known resource deposits on the planet with heightening

efforts geared toward locating yet undiscovered and untapped reserves. Large-scale mining is

penetrating ever deeper layers, multinational land grabs are advancing to remote corners, and the

race is on for the neocolonial division of the seabed. In the last sixty years, more natural resour-

ces have been raided by humans than in all previous centuries together. This frantic rhythm of

‘progress’ has spurred images of crisis and doom while firing up the competitive rush for new

frontiers.

With growing consciousness about global environmental limits, there is urgent need for new dis-

courses and modes of representation that shift resource-related debates from a market driven do-

main to open platforms for engaged and decentralized public discourse. First and foremost, the

assumption that everything we encounter is a resource for human consumption must be challen-

ged, as this anthropogenic vision has led directly to countless environmental and social disasters.

The very term “resource” is a technocapitalist concept that World of Matter seeks to highlight and

disrupt. Instead, the term „ecologies“ acknowledges a compositionist state of existence that cons-

titutes non-hierarchical interactions between multiplicities of life, matter, and technology.

World of Matter investigates the complex ecologies undergrinding natural resource exploitation.

The project brings artists, architects and photojournalists together with theorists from the fields

of geography, art history and cultural theory. It aims to generate new modes of engagement, au-

diovisual media, texts, and cartographies, as well as to unpack the relevance and vitality of such

material in a series of public events, exhibitions and publications. Focusing on the development

of innovative and ethical approaches to renewable and non-renewable resources (agricultural,

maritime, fossil, mineral, land, water) World of Matter considers visual source material a crucial

tool for education, activism, and public awareness, particularly in light of increasingly privatized

commodity chains and the gated power networks that control them.

Since early 2010, the core group of nine has come together for a series of week-long research

meetings to develop a common ground for the project. One of the first declared tasks was to

expand the notion of natural resources ¬– or “commodities” as traders call them – from hitherto

geophysical and economic-industrial contexts toward the aesthetic-philosophical arena. Yet we

are aware that if we solely attempt to “culturalise” the discourse on natural resources by mul-

tiplying images or forging new terminologies, we fail to address a deeper problem. If we are to

speak about a more-than-human world, it will not suffice to build a socio-cultural vocabulary

through a human-centric discourse that views the Earth primarily as a provision, object of scien-

tific research, or sphere of human perceptions, experience, and control. To de-centre such anth-

Cotton production, India (Uwe H. Martin); Ashanti goldmines in Ghana (George Osodi)

ropocentric perspectives, a more radical shift in thinking is needed which moves from a notion of

resources understood as a system of supply lines for humans towards a deeper attention to the

situated materialities of stuff like gold, rice, oil, fish, land or water and the complex, multispecies

entanglements within which they emerge. This considers a planetary perspective on a world that

matters.

As a collective response to the dominant resource paradigm of greed and opacity, all contribu-

tors to World of Matter have pledged to share material from their current work on an open access

platform that connects different files, actors, territories and ideas. Individually, each participant

has developed his or her own methodology for intervening into existing discourses. The structure

of the website however, as the backbone of the project, is a collective effort. Essentially an entan-

glement of empirical studies and critical-aesthetic reflections on this same research, the digital

platform will offer myriad trajectories, resisting any overarching narrative structure. Rather than

full-length videos, all media are edited into a multiplicity of documents and video clips that are

configured and interlinked, rendering visible new connections and potential relations between

seemingly distinct events, forces, and locations. By connecting a visual document about illicit gold

mining in the Amazon basin with a video file of the Nigerian oil delta states or Egyptian land use

politics, we aim to activate a variety of possible readings about global flows and histories bet-

ween these sites. The forthcoming World of Matter web platform (www.worldofmatter.org) and

the compilation of project texts and images in the following pages propose diverse processes of

producing, undoing and relinking existing narratives to ignite a rethinking of the relation between

materials and discourse. More broadly, our project seeks to advance a deeper understanding of

resources as intricately entangled ecologies of things, places, and species interactions.

Multimedia Platform

At the heart of World of Matter is a multimedia web base, designed by based at the Zurich Univer-

sity for the Arts, ZHdK. The collective multitude of media files on the web platform will be com-

mented by means of theoretical reflections and aesthetic considerations, providing further infor-

mation of the research topic and their cultural significance. Its different media components will

function simultaneously as individual artworks and as nodes in the larger constellation. This is

made possible by the way in which all media will be edited into a multiplicity of separate audio-vi-

sual documents that can stand alone or be reconfigured and interlinked to one another, rendering

new insights into relations between seemingly distinct issues and locations (e.g., the neo-colonial

politics of resource extraction in the Niger Delta and the Amazon Basin). In the exhibition as well

as through the internet platform, this omnipresent connectivity mirrors the intense interdepen-

dence between the different sites in the context of global circulation.

Project Period

Project production phase January 2011 - December 2013

Multimedia platform goes online Fall 2013

Exhibition of finished works February 2014

Partners

World of Matter is a collaboration of

Institute for Critical Theory (ith), Zurich University for the Arts ZHdK (CH)Visual Department at Goldsmiths College, London (UK)Fine Arts Department at State University of Minas Gerais, UFMG, Belo Horizonte (BR)Hartware Media Art Association, Dortmund (DE)

Research Roundtable Meetings

The project structure is based in a collaborative process which is advanced through major round-table meetings which last 4 days and generate semi-public laboratories, public conferences and exhibitions of the research phase.

1st meeting: Gasworks London, April 26 - 30, 2011 (public conference)

2nd meeting: ITH, Zurich University for the Arts, Dezember 15 - 18, 2011

3rd meeting: Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, April 11-14, 2012 (public conference)

4th meeting: Hartware Media Art Association, Dortmund, October 11-14, 2012

5th meeting: Argos, Brussels, public conference, October, 2013 (public conference)

Workshops and Educational Programming

Workshops, seminars and semi-public events are planned with the following institutions:

Goldsmiths College London (UK), April 2011, incl. exhibit of student projects at Gasworks London.

MA Visual Arts at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, winter semester 2012

Design Masters, Zurich University for the Arts, workshop on Sustainable Design, March 2012

University of Applied Arts Vienna, digital arts workshop on Subterranean Ecologies, June 2012

Exhibition

Hartware Media Art Association, Dortmund (DE), February 2014Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (SE), 2015

Publication

An english publication will be produced parallel to the exhibition at Hartware Dortmund in 2014.

A 200 page black and white work book is in production following the conference in Belo Horizon-te, capturing the current state of the projects and including local contributions. To be released in 2013.

Major contribution of Supply Lines in upcoming Third Text special issue on Art and Ecology,edited by TJ Demos and Yates McKeen.

Uranium Mine in Niger, Sahara Chronicle by Ursula BiemannSugar Monument by Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan

Core GroupMabe Bethonico, Belo Horizonte (BR), artist-researcher

Ursula Biemann, Zurich (CH), artist, videoessayist and curator

Uwe H. Martin and Frauke Huber, Hamburg (DE), photo journalist, interactive media publishers

Helge Mooshammer & Peter Mörtenböck, Vienna (AU), research architect and cultural theorist

Emily E. Scott, Zurich (CH), art historian, cultural geographer and artist

Pablo Tavares, Campinas (BR), architect and autonomous media practitioner

Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Amsterdam (NL), artists

Additional contributors of media and research to web platform

Elaine Gan, Santa Cruz (US), artist and researcher

George Osodi, Lagos/London (NG), photographer

Ed Kashi, New York (US), photographer

Ingrid Wildi Moreno, Geneva (CL) video artist

Judy Price, London (GB), filmmaker and artist

Peter Cusack, London (GB), sound artist

Peter DiCampo (US), documentary photographer

Nabil Ahmed, Dhaka (BD), social anthropologist

Critical Goods: Making Global Resource Geographies More PublicEmily E. Scott

My interest in Supply Lines is tied, first, to its critical-aesthetic articulation of a constellation of resource geographies that (each and together) give visibility to the complex and mutable rela-tions between specific material goods and the social, spatial, political, historical, and economic contexts through which they are produced. The various resource-investigations constituting this project, while highlighting the movement of goods along networked supply lines, simultane-ously attend to the peculiarities of individual, brute substances, embodied actions, legal machi-nations, and actual sites (e.g., of extraction, circulation, consumption), foregrounding tensions between resource mobility and locatedness, abstracted and “hard” values, distant and local points, etc..

In elucidating such layers, they offer a counterpoint to both traditional maps (i.e., which presu-me the possibility of a comprehensive, God’s eye view) and documentary modes of represen-tation (i.e., which presume the possibility of authoritative truths). One of my central roles will be to help develop an interpretive framework that coheres the project’s various visual research components and contextualizes them theoretically and historically. In particular, I will draw upon my academic background to bring Supply Lines into dialogue with pertinent discussions happening within the disciplines of human geography (e.g., about resource geography, critical spatial theory) and contemporary art and art history (e.g., about land-based art, art and re-search, post-representation).

I am equally invested in amplifying this project’s aim to expand public knowledge and debate about natural resources, especially in light of the ever more privatized nature of their dissemi-nation and definition (e.g., through the corporatization of actual resources, the consolidation of mainstream media channels). For in addition to reframing resources as contingent rather than stable or pre-given, Supply Lines seeks to reposition the public in relation to the politics of their production. In building a series of audio-visual pieces, texts, cartographies, and public discus-sions culminating in a major exhibition, this project creates and models new access points into resource geographies. As such, it actively intervenes in top-down flows of information as well as the (related) representation of resources via over-simplified have-have not narratives, crisis-dri-ven rhetoric, now-iconic imagery, etc.. In line with my previous writing about the potential of art to uniquely catalyze positive social and environmental change, I am eager to explore the ways in which Supply Lines might contribute to the shaping of cultural discourse about and public participation in increasingly acute, environmental-geopolitical resource issues.

Finally, I am keen to consider the ways in which Supply Lines forges a collaborative and inter-disciplinary mode of geographical knowledge production, wherein thinkers and makers from a range of fields come together to produce new vocabularies to critically address current resource geographies; artists employ fieldwork methods borrowed from geographers, ethnographers, and radical journalists; and visual representations embody geographical theory and praxis. (Geogra-phers are, of note, increasingly curious about such “creative” or “experimental” geographical practices, as evidenced by a host of recent academic symposia and publications devoted to the topic.) The structure of this project – an open-ended platform produced by a team of internatio-nal practitioners conducting sustained aesthetic research on specific case studies -- mirrors the subject at hand. (How could one specialist, or even one discipline, begin to effectively broach such a vast topic?) Supply Lines, of course, proposes to establish new circuits of exchange as well, both among the project producers and the broader publics that come in contact with this work. I look forward to lending my organizational and pedagogical skills to the strengthening of feedback loops throughout the process, whether by facilitating discussions during group meetings or conceptualizing and orchestrating public programming at crucial junctures along the way.

Emily E. Scott, Zurich (CH), art historian, cultural geographer and artist

Emily Eliza Scott is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist whose work focuses on the creative-critical interpretation of contemporary landscapes. In 2010, she completed a PhD in Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, with a minor in Cultural Geography. Her dissertation, “Wasteland: American Landscapes in/and 1960s Art,” examines early land-based art in the U.S. in relation to the actual spaces and spatial politics its engaged.

Parallel to her academic studies, she founded the Los Angeles Urban Rangers, a group that deve-lops guided hikes, campfire talks, field kits, and other interpretive tools to spark creative explo-rations of everyday habitats in their home megalopolis and beyond. Their recent projects include a series of public “safaris” elucidating Malibu’s contentious public-private coastline (documen-ted in Actions: What You Can Do With the City at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Open City at the 4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, and Just Spaces at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 2007-10); a trail system through the only “wild” plot in Almere, the Netherlands (Museum De Paviljoens, 2008); and a tour of the Whitney Museum from an eagle eye perspective (Whitney Biennial, 2008). In collaboration with the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, they are currently investigating the university’s little-known Natural Reserve System, an archipelago of field research sites spanning the state, with plans to design a field guide and related programming to facilitate expanded uses of these spaces, especially by non-scientists.

An avid believer in the value of interdisciplinary exchange, she has taught contemporary art and theory to environmental scientists (UCLA Institute of the Environment, 2005-7); co-organized events about intersections between contemporary art and geography such as Re-Working the World: Contemporary Art & Geographical Activism (Association of American Geographers’ an-nual meeting, 2007) and Field Works: Art/Geography (UCLA Hammer Museum, 2005); and has forthcoming texts in Art Journal as well as the edited volumes Geohumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place (Routledge, 2010) and Architecture and Field/work (Routledge, 2010). Her re-search has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Luce Foundation, the Smithsonian, and the Switzer Foundation.

Mineral Invisibility

Mabe Bethônico

The primary economic activity of Minas Gerais has given this second most populous state in

Brazil its very name. Although mining occupies vast expanses of land and profoundly impacts air

and water supplies as well as human health and livelihoods, it remains largely invisible, inclu-

ding to those who live in its shadow. Only in the last couple of years, as Chinese investors have

become involved beyond the scope of importing Brazilian minerals by acquiring large tracts in

Minas Gerais and gaining control over entire extractive operations, has mining surfaced in the

daily news.

The aim of this project is to give visibility to mining in both its historical and contemporary ma-

nifestations – contributing to the circulation of information through mapping and the production

of images and content. Under the pretext of researching women workers in the mines, I was gran-

ted rare access to visit and photograph. This was supported by the perception that, as an artist, I

must be harmless and that female employees generally give a positive image of the company.

The small mines, spread all over the state and often illegal, are monitored by the Ministry of Work

and Employment with its precarious means of inspections. Since 2000, they generate photogra-

phic and text reports of each mine inspection which are compiled in an archive, constituting an

x-ray of the mines underneath the image of “the great industry.” Surprisingly, the Sector’s officers

were eager to make their entire material more public through my project, which in itself raises

the question of public versus private, visible versus invisible resources in this field.

Apart from the wealth of visual material, “Invisibilidade Mineral” also compiles interviews with

various professionals on questions regarding the absence of specific images and information:

Why isn’t it possible to prove that mining municipalities have a lower quality of life than the ones

where large mining companies are absent? Why is there a historical absence of mining activities

and histories in Brazilian art, as opposed to, say, Mexican and Colombian art? How is the worker

actively made absent in the new Mining and Metals Museum? Why is mining still taught in schools

only through maps? This inquiry will drive the production of texts, videos, photos, publications

and posters and determine how this knowledge, which was kept undercover for so long, can cir-

culate more widely and begin to resonate.

Mabe Bethonico, Belo Horizonte (BR), artist-researcher

Mabe Bethônico, born and raised in Belo Horizonte, is an artist researcher with a MA and PhD in Fine Arts from the Royal College of Art, London (2000). Her artistic practice involves long-term research resulting in visual and sonic pieces, installations, lectures, publications and websites, using documentary sources and field recordings.

Since 2003, her work has been exhibited extensively, e.g. in La Revanche de L’Archive Photogra-phique, Centre de Photographie, Geneva, 2010; Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan, Puerto Rico 2009; the 28ª Biennial of São Paulo - Em Vivo Contato, 2008; Encuentro Internacional de Medellin, Práti-cas Artísticas Contemporâneas, Museo de Antioquia, 2007; the 27ª Biennial of São Paulo - Como Viver Junto, 2006; Subversiones Diarias - MALBA, Buenos Aires; Panorama da Arte Brasileira, MAM Museum of Modern Art, Sao Paolo, and the Art Museum of Pampulha, 2005; Telling Histories, Kunstverein Muenchen, Munich, 2003. Her work is regularly reviewed in the Latin American and international art press. She is Professor in Fine Arts at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, lectures and gives workshops worldwide.

Without you, The World Would Be A nightmare.

Elaine Gan

Rice drives the most resource-intensive agricultural systems today—sites of massive surplus

production and rationalized exploitations that feed half of the world‘s human population. Wi-

thin the first four months of 2008, rice prices more than doubled from US$393 to over US$1,020

per metric ton. Resulting food shortages particularly in Southeast Asia are linked to rapid-fire

free market speculation (specifically, computerized commodity futures trading) and long-term

structural adjustment programs imposed by transnational agribusiness—not actual grain supply.

Hunger among the poorest triggered by bookkeeping.

We are told that one out of every six humans alive today is starved. We are also told that such

dire and asymmetrical levels of subsistence (always a threat to state security and neoliberal

contracts) can be improved through precision breeding and banking of high performance or

„elite“ rice varieties that mature faster, produce higher yields, and consume less water, land, and

labor. Superhero seeds for better incomes. Thus, we breed new transgenic species while commit-

ting others to extinction. Hydraulic systems and practices of shifting cultivation that sustained

mountain provinces for centuries are rendered obsolete, even as bacteria in lowland irrigated rice

paddies cumulatively emit volumes of methane that destabilize world climate patterns. Coopera-

tion between „developing“ and „industrialized“ nations fund gene banks that store hundreds of

thousands of seed varieties ex situ while indigenous assemblages from which the seeds emerge

are stripped and dispossessed. Superheroes obscure backdrops of slow unspectacular deaths.

Absences rendered by neoliberal scarcity and genetic erosion.

There is much at stake in building different apparatuses: speculative viewfinders that composite

alternate aesthetico-political representations, provoke new imaginaries, perform expanded modes

of questioning and critical engagement. Mine is not a project to describe hunger solely as a socio-

economic construction governed by fields of experts. Rather, it is a project that seeks to map

historically constituted fragmentations, synthetic cycles across incompossibilities, and violent

dislocations as „sites of becoming and opportunities for belonging.“1 It asks, what does a grain

of rice need in order to survive and get along? What aleatory relations of force and energy con-

dition its transformation, inheritance, or exchange? Thus, it begins with a search for methods of

mapping temporalities, durational synchronies that emerge from and enact biocultural or intra-

species entanglements. To unpack such processes as a dynamic manifold constituted by diffe-

rential, multivectorial, polytemporal events is to collide with—and radically reconfigure—human-

centered, profit-extractive calendars and quarterly reports through which we have come to define,

standardize, and financialize rice supply.

Elaine Gan, Sta Cruz (US), artist and researcher

Elaine Gan studied critical art practice at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, ea-

rned an MFA in Digital Arts/New Media at University of California, Santa Cruz and a BA in Ar-

chitecture at Wellesley College, MA. Gan is a member of the Advisory Committee for Interdiscip-

linary Arts at the New York Foundation for the Arts and a fellow of the Science & Justice Program

at UCSC. Her projects have been supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York

Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Foundation, and NY Department of Cultural Affairs. Exhibitions

at art venues include the Guangzhou Triennial (China), Real Art Ways (CT), Soap Factory (MN), and

in New York at Bronx Museum, Artists Space, Socrates Sculpture Park, Exit Art, and PS122. Her

current research experiments with software to visualize polytemporalities of rice cultuvation and

exchange as a critical means of mapping worlds otherwise.

Rephrasing of life stories and the Transformation of Labour (working title)

Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan

The so-called Northeast Polder is a 180 square miles section of former sea bottom that was drai-

ned and added to the Dutch land in a period when overseas colonies became independent. The

island Urk was incorporated into the reclaimed land and the inland sea where its fishermen had

fished for generations was closed off. Although the government had amortised the local fishery,

Urk’s fishermen managed to improve their boats and exchanged their nearby fishing places for

pitches far out in the North Sea. Nowadays, the once secluded and traditional fishing community

owns large parts of Europe’s fishing fleet and hosts Europe’s largest fish auction. Nevertheless,

the fishermen are again facing dire straits with rising fuel prices and increased foreign supply of

farmed fish.

As artistic fieldworkers we are used to constantly evaluate our actions and rethink our positi-

on, but the fishermen turned out to be engaged in similar processes. The global upscaling of the

market and an increased critical public perception cause them to constantly renarrate their story,

reconsider their practice, and reshape their self-image. This reshaping and rephrasing takes place

as a collective performance of the community, an ongoing dialogue in which we, as artists, were

welcome too. After a sustained period of research, we asked the fishermen and members of their

community to recite dialogues addressing their concerns on suitable locations. We recorded their

performance in situ, and intersected these scenes with comments on the fishermen’s experience in

combining conflicting ways of being.

Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Amsterdam (NL), artists

Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan collaborate since 2002, producing artworks that

explore the tones, movements and textures of Europe’s landscapes like its new borders (Gross-

raum, 2005), sites of global trade (Monument of Sugar, 2007), or the non-sites of cultural heritage

(Monument to Another Man‘s Fatherland, 2008/2012). In textual supplements they disclose the

contingency of their fieldwork and research.

Van Brummelen studied at Rietveld Academie and Rijksakademie and is currently doing a PhD

research at the University of Amsterdam. Siebren de Haan has a Master of Philosophy from the

University of Amsterdam. They have been tutors at diverse Master programs. Venues where their

works have been shown include Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Kunsthaus Zürich; Argos, Brussels; De

Appel Amsterdam; CCA Vilnius; the Shanghai and Guangju Biennials. Their works are included in

public collections of a.o. MUDAM Luxembourg; FRAC Marseille; Museum of Modern Art, New York;

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Egyptian Chemistry

Ursula Biemann

Egyptians have long built large-scale engineering projects and launched huge land reclamation

ventures that could reallocate water across time and space for communities and entire ecosys-

tems. Parallel valleys, desert colonies and artificial food production manufacture a world in which

science is programmed to overcome the limits of nature and turn desert dust into soggy fertility.

Egyptian Chemistry explores the interaction between hydraulic, chemical, natural and human

forces, which together form the hybrid ecologies of Egypt.

Water vigorously shapes Egyptian life, but it doesn’t suffice to speak about a hydraulic culture

simply as a set of infrastructural motifs, we have to consider water, this ur-liquid, as a dominant

structure of experience that passes through the very molecules of a historical reality. Altered wa-

ter chemistry changes soil quality and entire agro-ecologies, thus shaping land management, ur-

banization, food supply chains and other collective organizations such as revolutions. The bonds

between all these components are neither causal nor simply economic. The philosophy behind

Egyptian Chemistry is that they form into dynamic interactive clusters where desert developers

and tiny water pollutants unfold equally effective actions.

Water samples taken in 16 locations along the Nile and around the Delta wetlands were probed

and the locations documented in their ecological configuration. Beyond an aquatic analysis, Egyp-

tian Chemistry brings scientific knowledge from multiple sources from atmospheric physics to

agro-ecology into conversation with one another. And as coordinating principle, the project draws

on metachemistry grasping the transformation of matter in its intimate molecular structure.

Ursula Biemann, Zurich (CH), artist, videoessayist and curator

Ursula Biemann (born 1955, Zurich, Switzerland) is an artist, writer, and video essayist. Her

practice is strongly research oriented and involves fieldwork and video documentation in remote

locations. She investigates global relations under the impact of the accelerated mobility of people,

resources and information, connecting a theoretical macro level with micro perspectives on the

ground. Major art projects include Black Sea Files (Kunst Werke Berlin 2005) and the widely exhi-

bited Sahara Chronicle (2006-2009).

Biemann held retrospective exhibitions at the Bildmuseet Umea in Sweden, Nikolaj Contempora-

ry Art in Copenhagen, Helmhaus Zurich, Lentos Museum Linz, and at film festivals FID Marseille

and TEK Rome. Her work also contributed to major exhibitions at the Arnolfini, Bristol; Tapies

Foundation Barcelona; Kunstmuseum Bern; San Francisco Art Institute; Kunsthalle Brandt Odense;

Kunstverein Hamburg; the Biennials in Gwangju, Shanghai, Liverpool, Bamako, Istanbul and Sevil-

la; steirischer Herbst, Graz; and many others. Forthcoming solo show at n.b.k. Berlin, March 2013.

Biemann received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts (1986) and in 1988 was a participant in

the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP) in New York where she lived throughout the 1980s.

Researcher at the ZHdK and publisher of several books, Biemann is appointed Doctor honoris

causa in Humanities by the Swedish University Umea (2008) and received the 2009 Prix Meret

Oppenheim, the national art award of Switzerland. http://www.geobodies.org

Deep Weather

Ursula Biemann

Oil and water are taken as the two primordial liquids that form the undercurrents of all narrations as

they activate profound changes in the planetary ecology. The video draws a connection between the

relentless reach for fossil resources with their toxic impact on the climate, and the consequences this

has for indigenous populations in remote parts of the world.

The video begins by documenting the huge open pit extraction zone in the tar sands in the midst of

the vast boreal forests of Northern Canada. After the oil peak, ever dirtier, remote and deeper layers

of carbon resources are being accessed now. Aerial recording of the devastated crust in the state of

Alberta give us a sight into the dark lubricant geology. Aggressive mining, steam processing and eva-

cuation of the tar-sands are impinging on environmental and human rights as they devastate territo-

ries of First Nation people.

Melting Himalayan ice fields, rising planetary sea levels and extreme weather events increasingly

define the amphibian lifestyle imposed on the Bangladeshi population. Climate change, exasperated

by projects such as the Canadian tar sands, puts the life of large world populations in danger. The

video documents the gigantic community effort in building protective mud embankments. Hands on

work by thousands without any mechanic help is what climate change will mean for most people in

the Deltas of the global south. These are the measures taken by populations who progressively have

to live on water when large parts of Bangla will be submerged and water is declared the territory of

citizenship.

Cotton Files, India and Texas (Uwe H. Martin)

Uwe H. Martin, HamburgPhotographer, Journalist, Multimedia Publisher

Uwe H. Matin is a visual storyteller mainly working on long term, in-depth documentary pho-tographic projects around the world. His research focuses on the effects of political economic decisions on local communities. Since 2007 he has been working on a photo-video documentary on the social and environmental impacts of the global cotton production in Central Asia, India, Burkina Faso, and the US.

Uwe H. Martin studied photography and photojournalism at the University of Hanover in Germa-ny and at the Missouri School of Journalism on a Fulbright grant. While still a student he started teaching photography at the University of Hanover and continues teaching workshop and semi-nars in the field of web documentaries and interactive visual journalism.

He is initiator and founding member of Spill The Beans! (www.spillthebeans.de), an association of photographers, filmmakers, journalists, graphic designers and artists exploring socially rele-vant multimedia projects.

His photographic work has been exhibited at the Leica Gallery in Solms, Hanover, Hiroshima and Perpignan, besides being published in Die Zeit, DU, Greenpeace, Focus, National Geographic Ger-many, Das Magazin, Geographical, XLSemanal, Merian, Missourian and others. He is represented by Focus Agency in Hamburg.

Cotton Files

Uwe H. Martin

Cotton is the fabric of our life. We wear its fibers on our skin and pay our cotton-filtered coffee with cotton-made paper money. We ingest its pressed seeds in potato chips and salad dressing, while cotton linters helps to paint our nails, recorded history on film and thickens the ice cream we eat during our first cinema date.

The darker side of this fabric of our life spins another tale: Millions of Africans were abduc-ted to work on the fields in the American south; Subsidies of 4.7 billion Dollars fail to make 25.000 US-farmers rich but distort the global market and ruin millions of peasants in Wes-tern Africa, where whole countries like Burkina Faso depend on cotton export; Where only 50 years ago, the world‘s 4th largest lake guaranteed a mild climate in Central Asia, today a chemically polluted salt desert remains, while 200,000 Indian farmers committed suicide during the last decade after they became dependent on corporate seed supply.

Cotton is the catalyst for change that will redefine agriculture in the coming decades. De-signed to reduce labor costs in high paying western countries genetically modified cotton-seeds are increasingly planted all over the world. With this patented seeds, which have to be bought every year the farmer is loosing his social, cultural and economic identity as a producer and becomes a consumer of expensive seeds and chemicals. Cotton growing is directly implicated in the degradation of large-scale ecosystems including the Aral Sea in Central Asia.

Aesthetic ApproachMy Cotton Files research project combines video files with photography, oral and written accounts as well as graphics. Coming from a jmagazine background and an education in journalism I started my investigation in 2007 with the aim to create a classical journalistic reportage. During my research and especially on my extended field trips, six to ten weeks each, I began to feel the constrains of this approach: A linear form excluding all sideways and alternative findings in order to „push the story“.

So I started broadening the project, playing with levels of uncertainty and open tracks wi-thin the project. I slowly shifted from a storytelling perspective of „This happend and that‘s why“ to a story constructive mode of „This might have happend - Find out for yourself“. This open approach of uncertainty leans itself more towards arts practices then journalism and pushes me down a road I never wanted to travel because of the implied artificial crea-tion of scarcity in the art market place. This artificial scarcity positions the discourse about the work into an elite circle, excluding the general public, which my work aims to in the journalistic context. In becoming part of the „Supply Lines“ project I recognize the chance of marrying the two worlds of arts practices with journalism’s free diffusion of knowledge.

Paulo Tavares, Campinas – Sao Paulo (BR), architect and media practitioner

Paulo Tavares is an architect and urbanist graduated in Brazil. He has taught at the MA program-

me at the Centre for Research Architecture – Goldsmiths, UK and currently teaches at the Catholic

University of Quito, Ecuador. His texts had appeared in many publications worldwide including

Nada (PT), Alfabeta2 (IT), Cabinet (US), Piseagrama (BR) and Third Text (UK). His work has been

shown in various venues including CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, Haus der Kultu-

ren der Welt, Berlin, Portikus, Frankfurt and more recently at the Taipei Biennial 2012.

OF EARTH AND CAPITAL Paulo Tavares

“Although gold and silver are not by Nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver”-- Karl Marx, in Capital.

Of earth and capital tells the history of two mining sites in the region of the Madre de Dios River

basin, southern Peruvian Amazon. Huaypetue is a 200km-wide desert-like crater that was car-

ved out in the middle of the jungle in the dawn of the neo-liberal era, when Peru was under the

dictatorship of president Alberto Fujimori and extralegal economies of gold came to serve as

safety valves to absorb the large waves of impoverished migrants generated by the IMF-infused

‘structural adjustments’. Twenty years latter, at the moment when the financial crisis triggered

shockwaves throughout the world and gold-prices hit unprecedented highs, a series of makeshift

gold-towns started to populate that same region. Designed to be un-built and re-built following

the oscillations of the market, Lamalito -- “little mud” --- configures an archetype of the resource-

frontiers architecture of our present time, when labour is flexible and the materiality of gold re-

turns as safe ground amidst a sea of instabilities. Distant in time but spatially related, the history

of these two mining sites serve as spatial probes to characterize the cycle of structural crisis that

lie at the core of neoliberal regimes, inside which gold is a matter which value fluctuates accor-

ding to political tensions and capitalist anxieties, indexing the fragility of a system that the more

immaterial it gets the more it has to rely on the raw materiality of the earth.

Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer, Vienna (AU)

Peter Mörtenböck is Research Fellow in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, Univer-sity of London. He is also Professor of Visual Culture at the Vienna University of Technology. His recent books include Networked Cultures: Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space (2008), Space (Re)Solutions (2011) and OCCUPY (2012).

Helge Mooshammer is a theorist of visual and spatial culture, whose research is concerned with changing forms of urban sociality, processes of transnationalisation and newly emerging regimes of governance. Based at Goldsmiths, London and TU Vienna, his current research Other Markets engages a worldwide collaboration on an atlas of informal markets. www.othermarkets.org

Together, they are co-founders of ThinkArchitecture, a London and Vienna based research prac-tice whose projects investigate urban space and geopolitical processes through a diverse set of disciplines and approaches, including design, photography, film, intervention and critical writing.

World of Matter - mapped interactions Helge Mooshammer & Peter Mörtenböck

In the context of World of Matter which generally aims to unsettle the hegemonic discourse

about resources, their properties, interrelations and values, our contribution for the exhibition

takes the form of an analytical piece on the truth about resources. What knowledge regimes

govern the provision, exploitation and distribution of resources? What is the interplay between

scientific and market institutions in establishing accounts of resource availability and their

respective values? Through which measures are, for instance, discourses of resource scarcity

promoted.

To unravel these co-operations the exhibition piece will employ a series of cartographies, texts,

and visualised data that draw on research by ourselves and others as well as making referen-

ces to the works by other World of Matter members on display. Mapped interactions will e.g.

include the workings of international law in substantiating claims on resources. Articulating

our own implicatedness in these processes, our piece will place emphasis on the interaction

between the promotion of material qualities and the performative dimensions of resource poli-

tics. In this context, we will be speculating about past and future interruptions in processes of

knowledge production and how these affect particular truths about resources.