Mining Conversations invites you to join its second online session The Futurepasts of … Forests. The monthly online series critically reflects and discusses extraction and energy landscapes, across geographies and temporalities—up to this moment in which resource regimes more than ever shape economic, societal and environmental realities planetarily and locally in very unequal ways.

Mining Conversations is a monthly online discussion series dedicated to how knowledge practices on local and planetary scales shape the energy landscapes we see today, whether influenced by past or present extraction practices. Each session connects different perspectives to better understand the social, material, technological, and environmental forces at play.  The series seeks to provide the needed space for cross-practice, international and reflective conversations about mining among artists, academics, activists, and other persons interested in mining.

Mining Conversations invites you to join its initial online session The Futurepasts of … Copper. It will be the start of a monthly online series to critically reflect and discuss extraction and energy landscapes, across geographies and temporalities—up to this moment in which resource regimes more than ever shape economic, societal and environmental realities planetarily and locally in very unequal ways.

An expansive educational and research collaboration through the formation of five river hubs spanning the Mississippi River’s headwaters to the Gulf.

Macarena Gómez-Barris immerses herself in Earth’s archive of wreckage as a way of exploring what accountability might look like in the present.

A close reading of coral samples from the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean—finding signals of ocean warming and the impacts of offshore oil extraction.

What is the new geological epoch made of? Unearthing the Present connected the geological analysis of the present with a discussion of the changing scope for social and political agency.

The artist Julian Charrière artificially remodels a biogeochemical cycle and casts it into a performance of reverse extraction: carbon molecules are captured from the air and turned into diamonds which are then “wastefully” cast into a glacier.

In search for the normative elements of technofossil classification, Anna Echterhölter reflects on this history of mineral classification in the European tradition and the thick classification of Pacific totemism.

Faced with the Anthropocene, Marcia Bjornerud sees a set of grave ironies at play that make it hard for any geologist to capture its real meaning. We can only acknowledge these ironies and use them wisely to restore a lost alliance with the Earth.

For the third keynote lecture of the State of Nature: Dialogues conference, art historian and cultural critic TJ Demos reflects on the art of climate emergency.

Poet and author Ruth Padel delivers the second keynote lecture of the State of Nature: Dialogues conference.

Mississippi Multiverse is an immersive film that starts from an embodied sensorial practice to reckon with the ecological impact of petrochemical industries along the river.

The installation The Current presented field studies by artists, scholars, and activists who were involved in the AC project Mississippi. An Anthropocene River.

How can one negotiate between extraction, decontextualization, and the outright exploitation that could cause unequal flows of knowledge?

Nathan Jessee speaks with Louisiana Gulf Coast Tribal leaders about the social and environmental threats they face and their efforts to ensure social and ecological futures.

On the different manifestations and impacts of the Louisiana Anthropocene, which have been lent somber new resonance in 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic.

How consideration of the local effects of global dependencies, can help us to reckon with—and change—our role in sustaining often damaging entanglements of commodity flows.

In response to the complicated entanglements of property claims in the Mississippi Delta, Sarah Lewison advocates for witnessing injustice as a way of preparing for repair.

A River Journey reflection on power, the simultaneously planetary and molecular petrochemical industry, and the petrostate.

How a “blues epistemology” can establish the critical historical consciousness crucial for determining more just futures in the Anthropocene.

From agricultural slavery to petroleum, the banks of the Mississippi in Louisiana represent an Anthropocenic space characterized by a slow history of extraction.

Exploring the amorphous fabric of technologies, environments, and humans shaping Earth’s critical future.

Clémence Hallé ruminates on the extractive tendencies of knowledge production, which can only be countered through mutual reciprocity.

Andrew Yang and Sarah Lewison urge us to consider the possibilities of moving beyond an economics of extraction.

Moraine/Terminal is a portable gathering, exhibition, and conversational space traveling alongside the mobile seminar Over the Levee, Under the Plow.

Hydrocarbons plunges into the complexities and contradictions of the oil era and thereby into the molecular basis of the technosphere. Interweaving film scenes with a variety of visual and research materials, as well as the “sounds of oil,” the session explores the speculative cultural genre termed “petro noir,” examining the geopolitical-industrial complex that drives petrochemistry and, by consequence, mobility, consumption, waste and adventure.

The technological dissolution between internal and external conditions for life is manifest in the way seeds are handled. A series of conversations explores the practices and ideologies behind the collapse of modification and mutation. A subsequent performance of micro-processions will conjure historical and current moments of the agro-industrial technosphere.

What triggered the technosphere? This lightning-round presents a visual and aural panorama of events that catalyzed the rise of our contemporary technical worlds.

How did we end up in this world of technological vertigo? This dilemma was the main theme of The Technosphere, Now, a showcase held on October 2, 2015.

A case study on the consequences of the mining industry in one of the former biggest mining enclaves in southern Europe: the town Trapagaran in the Basque country, Spain.

Alongside the handbook, a pair of practical applications has been conceived to substantiate the “Valuing Nature” issue.

The overexploitation of natural capital will lead to profound and unanticipated social and environmental changes, if we do not learn to “value nature”. But is the equivalence of natural and financial capital adequate? How can we identify the threshold between what can and cannot be  subjected to market rules?

A global-resources “rush” has led to chronic socio-ecosystemic deficits, thus creating the conditions for local- and global-state shifts within the biosphere and/or society, with unprecedented loss of resilience at all levels. Assessing our resources and permanently accounting for their usage and allocation are imperative to imagining and designing societies that are socio-ecosystemically resilient.

A reflection on how drilling and fracking technologies have transformed much of North Dakota and Montana.