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.

Sebastián Ureta gives a thick description of Anthropocene landscapes where vast, stratified dumps of chemical residues that largely outlive their creators.

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

“Some 300 billion metric tons of coal has been mined globally during the Anthropocene.” An excursion into the orginis of coal by geologist Colin Waters

A multimedia artwork that uncovers the sublime beauty of fossilized forests.

How has the extraction of coal throughout Illinois changed the local landscapes and living conditions? A field trip to the Middle Fork of the Vermillion River examined both the intentional as well as unintended, or “feral,” consequences and responses to the practice of coal mining.

The mining compound at Deqingcun acts as a surrogate for the Chinese-Tibetan conflict. This exploited landscape provides the pattern for a hand-knotted rug by artist Eva Castringius.

A relfection on the knowledge of interconnectedness of the indigenous Muria Gond community.

Within the technosphere, earth becomes energy, people become populations and space becomes sphere. But how to make visible this network of flows coursing through our bodies?

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.