• Federal Cultural Foundation
  • 2011-2016

WORLD OF MATTER

The current revival of the scarcity model is different in the sense that it is taking place in the context of post-millennial concerns over climate change, peak oil, and the loss of biodiversity—one in which resource depletion has become increasingly entangled with the affective regime of late capitalism and its expansion of commodity space.

An infinitely exploitable resource, symbolic and affective commodities are the key currency that is now employed to mitigate the late-capitalist crisis of the political economy. They are designed to bail us out of a growing ecological debt and to help us reorient our attachment to the ecologies we inhabit.

World of Matter, HMKV, Dortmund, 2014

World of Matter is an international art and media project investigating primary materials (fossil, mineral, agrarian, maritime) and the complex ecologies of which they are a part. Initiated by an interdisciplinary group of artists and scholars, the project 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.

The project 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; this human-centered vision has been the motor for many environmentally and socially disastrous developments. The social ecologies presented on this site give evidence to the interdependence between human and non-human actants in this fragile system.

World of Matter considers visual source material a valuable instrument for education, activist work, research, and raising general public awareness, particularly in light of the ever more privatized nature of both actual resources and knowledge about the powers that control them. Hence the project acts through exhibitions, public events, publications and an online platform.

COOPERATIVE OF THINGS

While the many different approaches to emerging eco-systematic assemblages cover fairly distant sites and quite specific local constellations, one characteristic they tend to share is that of a conflictive confrontation between on-site conditions and translocal dealings—a conflict that not only stems from antagonistic self-interests, but is underpinned by wider philosophical concerns about how we can make sense of our collective being in the world. This urge to find a different theoretical framework, a framework better suited for the complex interplay of human and non-human forces, has surfaced in parallel to a growing recognition that the current crisis cannot be overcome by purely readjusting the settings of old-school economic operations. It is here that the call for a new ecological understanding fuses with the call for a new political economy.

URBAN RESOURCES AT THE CROSSROADS

The acceleration in the mining of mineral resources over the last decades has been staggering. Between 1984 and 2011 the world production of mineral raw materials (iron, ferro-alloy and non-ferrous metals, industrial minerals and mineral fuels) has risen from 9.4 billion to 16.6 billion metric tons, representing an aggregate growth rate of 77 percent. In 2008 total global resource extraction—metal ores, fossil fuels, industrial and construction minerals, and bio mass combined— amounted to 68 billion tons. It is important to understand the parallel trend of increasing global urbanization as not merely mirroring this development, but as a key driving force behind global resource extraction and consumption. Indeed, the most pronounced increase in resource extraction concerns the area of construction minerals. While this is the least well documented area of resource exploitation, and data is sometimes patchy and varied, calculations indicate a growth of up to 135 percent over the last thirty years.

GEO-ENGINEERING: CLIMATES OF CONTROL

Control over resources has undoubtedly become the driving force behind development planning and government policies regulating our relationship to the environment. While the threat of resource depletion may be an important motivation for this orientation, it is also fuelled by deep-seated fears of environmental insecurity due to changes in the scale and magnitude of environmental degradation. Against the background of slowly evolving problems such as air pollution, global warming, and climate change, on the one hand, and dramatic, major accidents such as oil spills and industrial fires and explosions, on the other, “risk management” has become a buzzword frequently used in connection with the development of programs for increased environmental control.

Project collaborators
MABE BETHONICO
URSULA BIEMANNUWE H. MARTINHELGE MOOSHAMMERPETER MÖRTENBÖCKEMILY E. SCOTTPAULO TAVARESLONNIE VAN BRUMMELEN
Supported by
ZÜRCHER HOCHSCHULE DER KÜNSTE
THE GEORGE FOUNDATION
KULTURSTIFTUNG DES BUNDES

© worldofmatter.net

The World of Matter multimedia platform, launched in Brussels in 2013, is the backbone of the collaborative project, providing an open access archive that connects different files, actors, territories and ideas. Its content is the result of extensive field research and media production in situations of heightened material significance, including: the extractive Amazon basin, Indian cotton farmers, water ecologies of the Nile, fisheries in the Dutch polders, mining culture in the Brazilian Minas Gerais, and the rush for arable land in Ethiopia. The platform includes material from the World of Matter core group as well as a number of additional, related art and media projects. It is conceived in such a way as to stimulate a variety of possible readings about the global connectivity among these sites.

World of Matter considers a planetary perspective on a world that matters.