Supply Lines | 2012
Visions of Global Resource Circulation, Research Project 2011-2012
This visual research project explores human interactions with natural resources (e.g., water, oil, silver) and the spatial and social relations ensuing from them. Rather than understanding resources as fixed or externally given, the project conceives of them as collectively produced and able to mobilize and interrelate diverse areas with one another: geographically, historically, economically, and culturally. With growing consciousness about the global limitation and unsustainability of vital resources, there is an urgent need for new means of representation to convey the complexity of such social, geopolitical, ecosystemic and climatic relations. This project’s development of new visual and theoretical material aims to contribute to expanding the notion of “resource” from a hitherto primarily economic-industrial domain toward an aesthetic-cultural context.
Our theory building exerts from the actual milieu of resource operations as well as the geopolitical imperative to replace outmoded concepts of territoriality with ones that reflect the relationality and mobility characterizing contemporary global resource circulation. In recent years, and intensified by the 2008 international food crisis, for instance, a wave of neocolonial land grabs took place wherein state actors and private investors entered into long-term contracts to appropriate large expanses of fertile land in developing countries. (Uwe Martin, Alexa Hoeber). Similar patterns are observable with regard to global water supplies, giving new impetus to debates over the “constitution” and politics of the commons (Ursula Biemann, Pablo Tavares). In light of increasing conflicts over the distribution of such natural resources, culture itself – the recourse to and deployment of cultural connections and possibilities – has become a decisive resource in this debate. Hence, our driving question is how contemporary cultural formations might offer platforms of agency to develop innovative and equitable approaches to the handling of resources, particularly in light of the ever more privatized nature of both actual resources and knowledge about the powers that control them.
SUPPLY LINES brings visual practitioners with notable bodies of previous work on globalization together with theorists working in areas of spatial culture, geography, art history and cultural theory to critically examine concepts of resource extraction, use, circulation, and representation. It furthermore forges a collaborative and interdisciplinary mode of geographical knowledge production, with the ultimate intent of stimulating ongoing research, education and public interest in the common use of limited resources. In addition to reframing resources, in other words, Supply Lines seeks to reposition the public’s relation to them. In so doing, it aspires to contribute to participatory, community-oriented models of society, which are increasingly crucial as resource conflicts intensify.
SUPPLY LINES takes the form of a multimedia web platform containing new high-quality audiovisual media, cartographies and texts. There will be electronic publishing, semi-public programming generated by an international team of artists and theorists, and a major exhibition.
Concept Group
Mabe Bethonico, Belo Horizonte (BR), artist-researcher
Ursula Biemann, Zurich (CH), artist, videoessayist and curator
Uwe H. Martin, Hamburg (DE), photo journalist, interactive multimedia publisher
Helge Mooshammer, Vienna (AU), research architect and cultural theorist
Peter Mörtenböck, Vienna (AU), research architect and cultural theorist
Emily E. Scott, Zurich (CH), art historian, cultural geographer and artist
Pablo Tavares, Campinas (BR), architect and autonomous media practitioner
Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Amsterdam (NL), artists
Aside from the core group there will be media works by
George Osodi, Lagos/London (NG), photographer
Ed Kashi, New York (US) photographer
Ingrid Wildi Moreno, Geneva (CL) video artist
Judy Price, London (GB), filmmaker/artist
Todd Trigsted, Montana (US), artist
Research and production phase January 2011 – December 2012
Research Roundtable Meetings
The project structure is based in a collaborative process which is advanced through roundtable meetings which last 4 days and can generate semi-public laboratories and exhibitions of the research phase.
1st meeting: Gasworks London, April 21 – 24, 2011
with students from the MA program of Goldsmiths College.
2nd meeting: Zurich University for the Arts ZHdK, Institute for Theory, December 15 – 18, 2011
with students from the MA of Art and Media, ZHdK.
3rd meeting: MAP, Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, April 2012
visual conference with SL participants and students from the Fine Arts department of State University of Minas Gerais UFMG, Belo Horizonte (BR)
4th meeting: Art University of Groningen (NL), Fall of 2012
Partners
Supply Lines is a collaboration of:
Institute for Theory (ith), ZHdK, Zurich (CH)
Visual Department at Goldsmiths College, London (UK)
Fine Arts Department at State University of Minas Gerais,
The project is managed by the Institute for Theory, Zurich (CH)