soft/shadow metallurgies
ongoing sculpture and artistic research project
soft/shadow metallurgies asks: What forms of speculation, abstraction, and domination coordinate the compulsive attachments to what Kathryn Yusoff terms “white geology”? And what intimacies can be read back through the stages of separation between market and mine from which our geomaterialized fetishes recur?
Images in the artworks are from diagrams of industrial aluminium and copper production, scenes from stockbrokers at the London Metal Exchange, fieldwork photographs of aluminium production, and hand gestures taken from archival photographs of labourers of metal industry during WWII. The sculpture aims to think about the history, present and future of metal extraction, suggesting that we should become more aware of where our critical raw materials come from, and the power structures that linger behind them.
