Power from the Blazing Stone
Our first experimental art intervention in mining is completed! What an incredibly exciting journey and learning process this has been. We are very fortunate to have been working with Cornish Lithium. Exploring alternative and less invasive ways of extracting lithium, this young data driven company in Cornwall, UK, was an exciting partner eager to experiment with novel ways of interacting, imagining and envisioning, an approach that might lead to a new, integrative understanding of the ESG (Environment, Society and Governance) objectives.
Our novel artists-in-mining residency put the artist at the core of the mining process. The arts have the potential to open up spaces of imagination, embodied experience and dialogue. The residency aimed to address the intangible and relational aspects of the industrial processes, its impacts and technologies in use and people involved through arts-led approaches. In an open call we thus invited the artists to think how to inhabit green technologies in mining. Selecting from an amazing pool of applicants, the residency kicked off with a multi-dimensional workshop, included talks and literature about recent research inter alia environmental humanities, sustainability, geoengineering, and climate science, incorporated site visits to Cornish Lithium’s excavations, the archives and much more. The residency opened spaces of thought and reflection that allowed multiple perspectives.
In the end, artist Alexander Augustus designed an audio narration in a co-creational attempt that can be easily distributed in the virtual realm. Alexander, inspired by the works of sci-fi authors Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick, fused visions of a responsible future in mining with the Cornish mining heritage and mythology, which may stimulate a wider audience of scientists and engineers to merge the old with the new. Alexander collaborated with two great artists. Cornelius Link composed the music and acclaimed Cornish actor Edward Rowe, of the BAFTA winning movie Bait, narrated the five episode story, which helped to embed the work locally.
Watch the trailer and listen to the first episodes here >
