Walking Talking Minerals

As we face an increasingly and irrevocably changed climate, the word apocalypse is frequently on our lips. Apocalypse comes from the Greek root kaluptein: to uncover, which suggests that in the destruction of life as we know it something else may be uncovered and revealed. Mining – the generative action of our extractivist economy – uncovers minerals from their deep underground sleep to be recombined and reworked for our purposes. As the building blocks of life minerals contain their own animate potential. What are we extracting? Are these resources inert matter or the driving force of life on earth? When we mine them what lively potential are we uncovering? What apocalypses are we enacting?

Lou Sheppard and Laura Põld trace the animate potentials of minerals as they cycle through ecologic and economic networks – rock cycles, food cycles, currency cycles, techno cycles — attending to their phenomenological matterings. Attuning to the social and political repercussions of human-mineral alliances both artists explore what a post-human, post-apocalyptic environment might look like in the future, and has looked like in the past.

The exhibition consists of four interconnected works which resulted from a period of collaborative research performed in quarantine between Canada and Austria/Estonia. Põld’s lively objects invite visitors into a humming vibrant landscape, scored by political, economic and agricultural desire. Sheppard’s three channel video work surrounds these objects with post-human drag performers who imagine and reflect on their apocalyptic present.

Photos by Johanna Naukkarinen