Extractivist Landscapes

Field Trip – Learning with Save Our Sperrins

Photo of workshop participants and SOS community activists outside the Learmont Community Centre holding up posters of the postcard designs made during Conor Nolan's workshop

On 6 September 2024, participants of the Extractivist Landscapes workshops travelled to the Sperrins Mountains in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland to meet and learn with community activists and artists from the Save Our Sperrins (SOS) campaign (https://www.instagram.com/save_our_sperrins/). Our group was warmly welcomed by SOS campaigners Cormac McAleer, Fidelma O’Kane, Marella Fyffe, Jackie Keenan, Anton McCabe, and Sheila Byrne Morrison at the Greencastle People’s Office where they gave an overview and personal account of the campaign and the impact Dalradian’s exploratory license has had on the community. We discussed the significance of arts practice as a way of maintaining community bonds and mitigating the mental and physical exhaustion created by such a long campaign of resistance to extractivism.

We then walked together to take-in the farms that would be impacted by the proposed mine. After sharing lunch we toured the Sperrins Mountains further—an area declared as one of outstanding beauty—before visiting the Park Village for a presentation and discussion on ‘Art as culture protest’ led by Sheila Byrne Morrison of the Park Village Art Group. We discussed how the campaign has drawn on a variety of arts practices to reach and inform wider audiences, as well as to build solidarity with others resisting extractivism in different places. Participants spoke about the personal and community significance of creating and displaying art made as part of a group. Others reflected on how arts practices can be a mode of advocating for the integrity of land, and the rights of future generations of beings in the Sperrins environment. Learning on the land with SOS deepened our understanding of the significance of arts practices in resisting extractivism.

We would like to thank the SOS campaigners for their warmth, time, and expertise.

_{Meeting with the Save Our Sperrins community activists at the Greencastle People’s Office}

Image Credits: All photographs taken by Anthony Assad

Workshop 3 — Engaged Theorising and Wish You Were Here

Image of a person's hand drawing the word 'Sperrins'

On the 20 June 2024 we held our third Extractivist Landscapes workshop in UCD. In this session, we paired academic Professor Maeve Cooke (School of Philosophy, UCD) and Dublin-based artist Conor Nolan to again analyse the entangled relations between the extractivist processes of mining and how artists and activists work to reimagine the potential futures of post-excavated landscapes. Philosopher Professor Cooke began the workshop with a talk on ‘Engaged Theorising’, focusing on how decentering canonical critical theory can contribute to contemporary responses to extractivism as part of a wider process of ecological devastation. Emphasising the view of the Frankfurt School that artwork has the potential to critique capitalism, Professor Cooke positioned her talk as part of her larger project to push canonical critical theory beyond its subjugating complicities and still achieve its transformative ideal. Drawing on newer developments, particularly Fred Moten’s concept of the ‘undercommons’, Professor Cooke reflected on the idea of ‘generative refusal’ as a form of affirmative sociality that escapes policy and regulation while retaining an antagonistic positionality in relation to the dominant social order. Professor Cooke invited participants to explore examples of art practices that are generative refusals and to think about this kind of resistance in the context of extractivism in the Sperrins.

_{Conor Nolan presenting on his illustrative work and participants designing their postcards}

The second part of the workshop, ‘Wish You Were Here’, was led by Dublin-based artist and illustrator Conor Nolan. Using bold shapes and bright colours, Conor’s own work has been inspired by the aesthetics of printmaking and he led participants through a print and postcard making workshop to think through some of the messages we might want to send to and from the Sperrins. Considering the form of the postcard as an accessible expression linking artwork with particular locations and times, Conor inspired participants with examples of postcards that effectively combine text, image, and colours to visualise a message. Participants then put pens and pencils to paper to brainstorm ideas, and next used a lightbox to trace the original, rough forms with greater precision, concentrating on detail. Conor assisted participants in thinking about how to use colour and lettering to enhance their postcard’s message. At the end of the workshop, Conor collected participants’ work to print on the lithograph machine in his studio, with a view to bringing finished postcards to the Sperrins on the next workshop/site visit.

Image Credits: All photographs taken by Anthony Assad

Workshop 2— Visualising Climate Modelling and Making Impressions

On the 23 May 2024 we held our second Extractivist Landscapes workshop, again pairing an academic and artist to analyse the entangled relations between the extractivist processes of mining and how artists and activists work to reimagine the potential futures of post-excavated landscapes. The workshop began with an interactive climate science talk by Dr Conor Sweeney (School of Mathematics and Statistics, UCD) on ‘Visualising Climate Modelling’. Reflecting on questions about how to build public trust by translating climate change science using artistic methods, Dr Sweeney’s presentation drew on a wide range of types of images – from well-known science visualisations like the ‘hocky stick’ and ‘climate stripes’, to affective journalistic photography that captures the impact of environmental climate change on a human scale.

The second part of the workshop, ‘Making Impressions’, was led by Dublin-based artist Sarah Bracken Soper. In this radical clay workshop, Sarah reflected on the public response and community impact of two of her feminist, environmental art projects and prompted participants to think about the Sperrins and sites of extraction through a sculptural mode. Drawing on examples from her portfolio, Sarah emphasised the importance of materials, timing, location, and relationships in engaged community art projects. Participants were invited to create a piece of work in clay inspired by what we had learned so far about the Sperrins. Sarah led us through how to use hand building, additive, subtractive, and stop frame animation techniques in working with air-drying clay. A stiff, sticky, and fine-grained natural substance, clay was an ideal material to explore as another way of thinking through extractivism.

Sarah Bracken Soper presenting on her work and participants doing mark-making and hand-building in clay

Image Credits: All photographs taken by Anthony Assad

Workshop 1— Creative Public Engagement and Counter-mapping as Resistance

On the 26 February 2024 we held our first Extractivist Landscapes workshop in which we paired an academic and artist to analyse the entangled relations between the extractivist processes of mining and how artists and activists work to reimagine the potential futures of post-excavated landscapes. This workshop began with a presentation by Prof David Higgins (Leeds) on ‘Creative Public Engagement and Post-Extractivist Landscapes’. Reflecting on two UK-based research projects that enabled members of the public to develop creative responses to the more-than-human world, in the context of environmental crisis and nature disconnection, Prof Higgins inspired participants to consider how such work can help to address both the past and the future of post-extractivist landscapes, such as nature reserves in former mining areas.

The second part of the workshop, ‘Counter-mapping as resistance to extractivism’ was led by activist-artist and PhD researcher, V’cenza Cirefice (University of Galway). Participants explored extractivism and resistance through participatory mapping activities. We studied the community movement resisting gold mining in the Sperrin Mountains and anti-mining activism more broadly in Ireland. Counter-mapping asks us to explore other ways of relating to each other and the more-than-human.

V’cenza asked us individually to imagine a place of significance and what it would feel and look like if it became a site of extractivism. We then used watercolours, pencils, and collage techniques to create our individual maps, before coming together to discuss ways in which we could connect our individual maps to a wider story and map of anti/extractivism.