On-Trade-Off : Countering extractivism by transnational artist’s collaborations
Lotte Arndt and Oulimata Gueye in close exchange with the members of On-Trade-Off
The term extractivism designates far more than the literal extraction of raw materials from soils: It points in a wider sense to the structural foundations of global capitalism, its colonial history, and it’s ongoing afterlifes, comprising contemporary ecocides. It refers to an “understanding that the world, and all its beings, are inherently commodifiable, violently turned into ‘things’, operating as a standing reserve for the accumulation of profit and power in the hands of a few.”1 Global capitalism is fueled by fossil energies, which are most often extracted for the benefit of transnational companies collaborating with national governments, but to the detriment of local populations. In the past decades, extractivism has been theorized mainly in South American scholarship highlighting the “dramatic material change to social and ecological life that underpins [racial capitalism]”.2
In an extended view angle, the critical discussion of power structures in the global art world refers to extractivism to describe the frequent incorporation of artists from the Global South into galeries, biennales, fairs and exhibitions located mostly in the urban centers of the North, often without long-term engagement for the sustainable working structures in their countries of origin. While the symbolic surplus of the artist’s practice is appropriated unilaterally, the power of the metropolitan centers remains largely untouched.
How to address as an artist collective the profit-maximizing structures of extractivism? A collaboration between a dozen artists and writers on three continents, On-Trade-Off enters the “extractive zone” (Gómez-Barris 2017), critically examines its functioning, and searches for alternatives. Several artists and thinkers gravitating around the collectives Enough Room for Space (co-founded by Marjolijn Dijkman and Maarten Vanden Eynde, Brussels, 2005) and Picha (co- founded by Sammy Baloji and Patrick Mudekereza, Lubumbashi, 2009) pushed their long-term conversations further and started to inquire collaboratively about lithium mining in the Congo, the pitfalls of the promises of the green energy revolution, and more broadly, the unequal distribution of risks, destruction, wealth and opportunities along global value chains. The configurations of the group are evolving, and depend on the specific focus chosen for an exhibition or an event.3 It is nevertheless of crucial structural importance that the project relies on a collaboration between a collective in Lubumbashi, in central Africa, and another Brussels, the middle of Europe, with members joining from changing geographical locations, including Australia, requiring constantly to take into account the realities experienced on all sides.
The geographical starting point for the project is a site of extractivism par excellence: the Manono mine, situated in the Tanganyika province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, 500 kilometers from Lubumbashi. While the mine has been exploited for its tin reserves since 1919, it entered recently in the focus of international speculation on a strategic raw material for the green revolution: as explorative drillings conducted by the Australian company AVZ in 2018 have shown, the soil contains high concentrations of lithium, an alkali metal with high capacities to store electricity. The prospection on the mine’s ores that also contain cassiterite and coltan, both metals of strategic importance for wireless communication, concentrates as a conundrum the contradictions that On-Trade-Off examines: While promising to provide a more sustainable technology, the future extraction of the ore will most probably replicate the exclusion of local populations from the wealth of their soils.
Working on a collaborative project between two artist’s collectives in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Belgium renders today’s asymmetrical structures of the world-economy and their colonial history a palpable reality on many levels. While being connected through the value chains of global industries, artists participating in the On-Trade-Off project do not experience the same realities, according to their geographical situation. They work with different tools, went to heterogenous journeys, and recur to diverse esthetic approaches. The frequently abstract terminology that conceptualises extractivism materializes in the artworks as concret takes on the world, engaging with the local effects of globally traded ores, and their transformation in consumer products.4 It is precisely this interconnected reality that the transnational artististic research project On- Trade-Off interrogates critically.
In this text we will stress that On-Trade-Off strives, by its very structure, its multi- sited geography, its collaborative intention, and the internal redistribution of resources, to resist the rampant extractivist logics of the global art field, including the neo-exotic tokenism of artists from the Global South. By developing On-Trade- Off as a permanent dialogue between artists living and working closely connected to the sites of extractive mining, and group members confronted in their direct environment rather to the seducing surfaces of the electronic end products, the project systematically connects the extremities of the world spanning value chains that oftentimes are dissociated. While it cannot pretend to mitigate the destructive power of capital, it “stays with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) and engages enthusiastically in collaboration as a source of learning in multiple perspectives, and mutual transformation.
Ambiguous crossroads
How to work with the vocabulary of the neoliberal economy? On-Trade-Off advances in a field dominated by powerful corporate interests and the language of financial speculation. The collective’s work is permanently obliged to deal with forces that exceed by far its own possible impact. Reformulating Audre Lorde’s fundamental question, it has to ask incessantly if the available conceptual and esthetic tools can contribute to dismantle the extractivist house.
As a consequence, the group engages in continuous criticism and self-reflexivity, not only in the visual production, but also at a linguistic level. Beginning with the project’s title, the participating artists interrogate whether a transformative use of the very (visual and linguistic) vocabularies of global trade is possible: In neoclassical economic theory, a trade-off designates situations where increasing one part of an equation requires diminishing another. For example, the destruction of living environments in regions with strategic raw materials is the price to pay for augmenting international interconnectedness and increasing energy efficiency. Rather than to accept the fatalistic stance of this argument, the artists working together on the On-Trade-Off project question its assumptions, reconsider the material realities through research, and explore speculative scenarios inventing alternative modes to think about energy, global circulation, and transnational collaboration.
Thus, the group shares a common virtual and material space for textual and visual research, including images and footage by the artists themselves that can be re- appropriated and used by other group members. Collaboration materializes as commonized material. It was first named Banque collective - and evolved after intense discussions on the role of banks in global investment into Common (Re- )source. The new name is referencing both, the material flow that originates outside of the group, as a source, requiring responsible uses in more-than-human assemblages, and the critical interrogation of digital information media. It points to the space of the commons, ie. to use values that can be of general benefit precisely because accessing them is not privatized.