For the last two years, the series ‘What is Deep Sea Mining?’ has been investigating deep sea mining, in an effort to both inform about and help to pre-empt this, for now hypothetical, industry. The jump from speculation to reality is, however, short. One could say that there is no deep sea mining industry. Rather, what is being pushed is a discourse, a language, and an imaginary (a speculation), creating the conditions for financial interests to establish this new economic frontier as unavoidable.
Throughout this period of investigation, talking to different sources and reading from articles and documents ranging from economics and mining to biology and geology, Inhabitants stumbled upon certain, key words, terms, and concepts. Depending on who spoke them, however, their meaning shifted. They were polymorphic terms, open to the interpretation of different stakeholders of deep sea mining or its opponents.
This episode is a tentative and brief glossary of terms invoked in debates around deep sea mining. Inhabitants wrote them based on interviews with various sources, as well as official industry media, legal definitions and dictionary entries. The episode hopes to reveal something about how deep sea mining is a contested, polyphonic site, with the future of the seabed and its ecologies up for grabs.
Backst_age Healing the Ocean
TBA21–Academy 10th Anniversary
In collaboration with TBA21–Academy, st_age presents the Backst_age Healing the Ocean program to mark 10 years of TBA21–Academy’s commitment to addressing the need for care, commonality, and literacy towards the Ocean. Through a selection of excerpts from TBA21–Academy’s streams of enquiry, st_age initiates a growing video syllabus which will address the overarching concepts that define its curatorial program and research interests.
Is the Ocean an art space? A methodological approach? How do we extend care to the more-than-human? Can the notion of commons help us put a theory of care into practice? Our points of departure will be the inextricable entanglement of social and environmental issues, the importance of listening and responding, the role of art as a vessel of change, and the potent implications of understanding the Ocean as both a living entity and an epistemological substance—especially paramount in the current climate of reckless resource exploitation in the deep sea.
Throughout its programming, the Academy reinforces engaging and fostering a deeper understanding of, and relationship with, the watery worlds. Join us as we begin to explore our Ocean curriculum on st_age with an open-ended exercise in thinking, sensing, and Healing with the Ocean.
