World of Matter

World of Matter is a multimedia project Providing an open access archive on the global ecologies of resource exploitation and circulation

Image	Cluster
	Sahara Chronicle – Atlantic On the Atlantic coast, new migration systems are emerging as the Strait of Gibraltar is sealed off and border regimes change. Excessive fishing in the Mauritanian EEZ is affecting migration patterns.
	Conflict Matter The power of capitalist abstraction operates under cover: it spreads via fragmentations, zonings, borderlines, crossings and penetrations.
	Chernobyl – Sounds of Contamination Research into the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. More than 25 years later the exclusion zone is still in place. What has happened to the environment, nature, the region and the people directly affected since?
	Black Sea Files Territorial research on the Caspian oil geography during the construction phase of the BTC oil pipeline.
	Egyptian Chemistry: Land Reforms Inscribed in the Egyptian agro-ecologies are countless histories – those of modernization, continuous land reforms, artificial fertilization, insect migration, peasant activism. These historiographies have a decentralizing impact.
	Egyptian Chemistry: Agro-Sciences Egyptian Chemistry is a multi-part video project on the water chemistry and agro-ecologies of the Nile. The first cluster discusses the water engineering of the Nile for various large-scale land reclamation projects.
	Resource Cities What happens to entire landscapes full of resource deposits is directly dependent on the rhythms of urban demands and politics.
	White Gold – Texas Blues Lubbock in Western Texas is known as the cotton capital of the world. No other place hosts such a density of cotton fields and is more efficient. To stay competitive on the world market, US farmers in recent years reduced high labor costs with the help of genetically modified cotton, heavy machinery and chemical control of the plants.
	Ecological Capital The propositional character of resources can serve as focal point of engagement for a number of critical practices intervening in the geopolitical circuits of value production via the development of a democratic politics – a proposition that enables larger spatial fields of efficacy to emerge aro
	White Gold – Dying Sea Chemical use and excessive irrigation of cotton fields in Central Asia turned the fertile paradise of the Aral Sea into a chemically polluted salt desert. The decline continues in the south, where Uzbekistan forces its population to work the cotton fields.
	Non-human Rights In the new Constitution of Ecuador (2008), Nature, as similar to human beings, is defined as a subject of law.
	White Gold – Killing Seeds More than 270,000 farmers committed suicide in India since 1995. The center of dying lies in Vidarbha located at the once wealthy cotton belt of central India.
	Demiurgic Worlds There is a growing tendency that resources are not conceived of as the object of planning but as planning itself.
	White Gold - Organic Dreams In Burkina Faso cotton is the main export commodity in terms of value, generating income for approximately two million people in the country.
	Sahara Chronicle – West Trans-Saharan migrancy is organized into a network of ghettos, nodes and routes for land and sea movement. Due to the Moroccan desert wall in Western Sahara, migrants have to attempt fatal desert crossings, often ending up in deportation camps.
	Sahara Chronicle – Agadez Agadez and Arlit in Niger are southern gates to the Sahara. The exclusion of the nomadic tribe from the mineral wealth on their territory triggered the Tuareg Rebellion in the 1990s.
	LandRush - Frontier Land The soya highway connects the enormous farms in west Brazil to the Amazon harbor of Santarem. The road is the artery through which life flows into the region. In just forty years the road opened up the wilderness to commercial development which renders the land from forest to industrial.
	LandRush - The Farm Gambela, a forlorn plot of land tucked away between the Ethiopian highlands and the vast expanse of South Sudan. Gambela—hot, humid, flat. Unchanged for centuries: Tribes leading their herds. Anuak, Nuer, Murle fighting for cattle, women, pastures. First with spears, now with kalashnikovs.
	Mineral Exploitation A visual study on practices of work in mining, from XVI Century through the work De Re Metallica, de Georgius Agricola, to our days in Brazilian mines of Minas Gerais through images produced by the Brazilian Ministry of Work and Employment.
	Egyptian Chemistry: Ecologies Egyptian Chemistry III engages in the water ecologies of the Nile through interviews, water sampling and hydraulic modelling. It gives brief history of World Water Organisation and Muslim water laws.
	Black Gold Since oil was discovered in the Niger Delta in 1956, over 400 billion dollars worth has been pumped out of these fertile grounds.
	Monument of Sugar Monument of Sugar is a research into Europe’s subsidized sugar exports. To turn the flow of sugar around, the artists produced a sugar sculpture in Nigeria and shipped it to Europe.
	Mineral Invisibility The art project engages the ever-changing reality of the fast-growing mining industry in Minas Gerais, Brazil. With new documents and in circulating existing ones, Material Invisibility examines the rapid but publicly silent consumption of landscapes and vital resources.
	Episode of the Sea Episode of the Sea is the result of a 2 year collaboration with the fishing community of the former island of Urk in the Netherlands.
	Nitrate Chilean sodium nitrate was extensively mined in northern Chile between the 1870s and 1920s. Traded mainly as a natural fertiliser, it was also used in the manufacture of explosives, making it a crucial ingredient for the acceleration of both life and death.
	White Oil This field research examines the extraction and expropriation of stone from the quarries in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank.
	Earth Poison Earth poison is a research project that explores the place of law and diffused causality in the entanglement of environmental and political violence. In the first investigation presented for World of Matter the project follows large-scale groundwater arsenic poisoning in the Bengal Delta.