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.
Some of the world’s most extensive extractive regimes emerged in Britain during the period 1770-1830, fuelling the first stages of the manufacturing boom commonly associated with the Industrial Revolution. Certain more visible sites of extraction—such as the Parys opencast copper mine in Wales—became places of significant cultural and artistic interest, featuring in fashionable domestic tours of Britain. From this emerged a plethora of landscape paintings, travel accounts, and poems that influence how we visualise extraction to the present day. While shedding a light on these industries, this early interest in extraction was nevertheless shaped by a specific set of social values and aesthetic forms. This talk takes a different approach to the visualisation of extraction, looking to working-class writers and artists working in or adjacent to extractive industries. Taking a comparative, class-based approach, I argue, reveals an undercurrent of different imaginings of extraction, its social and environmental impacts, than hitherto recognised.
This paper explores the relationship between empire, environmental change and violent conflict in Central Asia during the closing years of Russian imperial rule. It focuses on imperial land dispossession, considering how policy and practice impacted rural ecosystems and local communities (particularly Kazakh and Kyrgyz pastoralists) in the east of what was the Governor Generalship of Turkestan; a region of mountain foothills, plains and river valleys close to the Chinese border. It highlights in particular the destructive nature of the ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011) of land survey and redistribution, linking this explicitly to the explosion of anti-colonial unrest in the east of Turkestan during 1916, both in terms of understanding the roots of violence and the form that this conflict took in rural areas. Knitting together the events of a massive anti-colonial revolt in which upwards of 300,000 people were killed and deeper-seated environmental marginalisation, the paper offers some thoughts on the temporalities of extraction and on the architectures that enabled extraction to take place.
This talk pursues an archaeology of environmental sciences assembled through mining industries that linked central Europe to empires in the Americas and northern Eurasia in the earlier nineteenth century. Mining sites from high Mexico to the Siberian Altai formed a world-infrastructure of natural inquiry, critical for the establishment of apparently novel systems of geological and atmospheric surveillance. Those programs were in fact deeply entrenched in a variety of underground practices and nomenclatures and routed into removal policies and forced migrations of captive labor. In grappling with this history, I’ll argue for a vertical plane of analysis that critically links extractive histories to atmospheric afterlives and which situates mines alongside plantations as violent models of Western domination over land and labor.
In 2020 in order to expand their iron ore mine, Rio Tinto blew up an Indigenous sacred site located in a cave showing continuous occupation since the last Ice Age, over 46,000 years ago. The demolition of the Juukun Gorge site is one in a series of mining atrocities in Indigenous lands. In her talk, Povinelli addresses how the public protection and legal defence struggle to extract themselves from the grip of geontopower.
Convened by Dr Sarah Comyn, this plenary roundtable opened Day 2 of the UCD Humanities Institute’s ‘Post-Extractivist Legacies and Landscapes’ conference. It featured talks by Professors Iyko Day (Mount Holyoke College), Macarena Gómez-Barris (Brown University), and Elizabeth C. Miller (UC Davis). Engaging with a range of methodologies, including scalar and Marxist approaches, decolonial methodologies, literary studies, and artistic praxis, this roundtable interrogated the racial and colonial logics of extractivism and its futures.