All that is solid melts into flow
Erosion is the natural process by which soil, rock, or other materials are gradually worn away and transported by wind, water, ice, or gravity. It is a continuous process that shapes the earth's surface over long periods of time. Several factors contribute to erosion, including the force of water, wind speed, the type of soil or rock, vegetation cover, and, of course, human activities. Deforestation, overgrazing, improper land management, and construction practices that remove vegetation or disrupt natural drainage patterns can increase erosion rates. Consequences can be detrimental: fertile topsoil can be lost, soil quality is reduced, and sedimentation in water bodies is caused, leading to water pollution and habitat degradation. All of these latter steps are part of the mining cycle – exploration, discovery, development, construction, production, reclamation – whose logic is readable as colonial and, thus, extractivist by default. All that is solid melts into flow.
«All that is solid melts into flow» is the concluding iteration of the short website text that describes Revital Cohen’s and Tuur Van Balen’s 2016 video work DISSOLUTION (I KNOW NOTHING) – referencing Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ famous sentence from The Communist Manifesto: «all that is solid melts into air». It depicts a literal outlining of how resource extraction and exploitation have (been) operated on the African continent since the 15th century. Minerals, agricultural products, timber – all causing a flow of wealth and resources out of the continent, extracted and transported to feed the demands of non-African industries and markets. Cohen and Van Balen write: «The footage used in Dissolution (I Know Nothing) composes a form of seascape, assembling fragmented connections through material and time from Congo, Rwanda and Nigeria through the Indian Ocean on a containership to China. Gunpowder, dissolved minerals, blinking LEDs, personal and colonial histories. All that is solid melts into flow.» With their process-oriented «situated practice» of photo- and video-graphic work, installations as well as object creation the duo has developed a unique artistic method, engaging in and confronting sites of mass manufacturing and, in so doing, upending logics of capitalism and colonialism, dis-solving structures, systems and ideas into other forms. Why, is there another side to this coin? All that is solid melts into flow.
The two-channel video DISSOLUTION (I KNOW NOTHING) takes the viewer on a journey of conjuring visuals and soundscapes. Extreme contrasts, combinations and contradictions are convoyed by a fast-paced clicking sound which, although at times outpaced by firework and other noise as well as the at first dull appearing sound of music, survives until the end. Eventually, when the music becomes louder, there is something energetic, something to grasp and hold onto: is it the movement, the constant movement that keeps on moving? Is it the movement that shows how everything is connected, although these connections might not always be graspable, they might not always be reliable and, in fact, they are most likely invisible? The movement that keeps on moving is also the movement of resources, capital, and labor across borders and continents, driven by global economic systems. It is facilitated through complex mobility networks that serve the purpose of sustaining those relations that will guarantee perpetual flow – never-ending, continuous, tireless, and borderless. All that is solid melts into flow.
What has long served as the origin myth of African mobility, the transatlantic slave trade, does indeed constitute a story of origin – of how the right goods reach the right place, at the right time, and in the right condition: «Modern logistics is founded with the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak.» (Harney & Moten 2013: 92) In «The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study» Stefano Harney and Fred Moten negotiate the term «logisticality». It is interestingly described as a social capacity that emerged out of a historical situation - colonialism - of absolute necessity to move forward despite what Édouard Glissant calls «the abyss, three times linked to the unknown»: the belly of the boat, the depth of the sea and the haunting of memory and imagination. (Glissant 2010: 6-9) Logisticality transcends the pervasive logic of contemporary capitalism’s progression, a constant but different moving forward – arrow-like, aimed and calculated – and its influence on social organization, labor, and power: all in all the physical movement of things and goods as well as the regulation of bodies, spaces, and time. Logisticality implies the capacity to find, recover, return (to and in) Relation[1], just as the artists are constantly feeding back and (re)turning narrative and material, objects and stories. All that is solid melts into flow.
Another work, a series of three images titled Retour, which the duo produced in 2015 offers a multitude of layers in its visual simplicity. All images show dark soil, from brown and gray to almost black in color. Carrying particles of gold, the soil could be either moist or extremely dry, it is hard to tell. The gold, a treasure in the land, here, beneath our feet and before our eyes, threads those stories, lose and untold. «Gold from computer motherboards scattered on the soil of a Congolese gold mine» the description reads. This one line generates an unforgiving depth, much like an abyss. In the images themselves no trace can be found, no hint, no mark of where they were taken. And so, marked through this absence, they signify a relationality that is explicitly laid out through these thirteen words; a relationality between history and power, extraction and resources, labor and technology. It is confined in a non-geographical space and a timeless loss. Earth, land, soil. They all are needed to imagine and build (a) future.
Retour (C-Type Print 75 x 75 cm)
Retour (C-Type Print 75 x 75 cm)
Retour (C-Type Print 75 x 75 cm)
Soil is where colonial relations need to be negotiated. «Soil is the inscribed body and erosion is the scar left by historical violence.» (César 2018: 261). In her 2018 text «Meteorisations» film maker and scholar Filipa César reads Amílcar Cabral, politician and poet, intellectual and fighter for independence in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. She brilliantly lays out how his anticolonial politics were greatly manifesting through his knowledge and understanding of geology. For Cabral, also an agronomist for the Portuguese colonial government, his path to liberation becomes a question of environmentalism, recognizing the importance of land and soil for class struggle. In the country formerly known as the Gold Coast, Ghana, the Portuguese set foot as the first Europeans in 1471 and named it after the «gold reserve» they found between the rivers Ankobra and The Volta: «da Mina», «the Mine». While there are many legally run mines in Ghana today, the eight-largest producer of gold globally, the country is grappling with illegal small-scale artisanal gold mining. Galamsey is the term used to describe this very old practice, «gather them and sell». Economic instability in recent years and high inflation rates of the early 2023 economy force more and more young people to become Galamseyers, i.e. sell gold for way under market value to be able to survive and submit to the dominance in machinery of Chinese miners. Although small-scale mining is restricted to Ghanaians only, there are loop holes for foreigners and the mining itself is unregulated which leaves open pits, un-rehabilitated land and contaminated soil and water (Toto 2023). The effects of Galamsey are evidently environmentally devastating and immediate for rural communities: In a 2023 study, published in the African Journal of Food, Agriculture, Nutrition and Development, that worked with a photovoice method in the East Akim Municipality (Eastern Region of Ghana), the interviewed people mainly reported on, next to heavy exposure to metals, changing their diets due to farmland and water contamination to ultra-processed foods and subsequent changes in health conditions (Nyantaki-Frimpong et all 2023). How could historic catastrophe become more apparent than through these circulatory systems and flows – in bodies, the environment, the economy and technology. All that is solid melts into flow.
In another great work, «A Situated Media Geology» on «The Coloniality of the Copper Mine in Tsumeb» Noam Gramlich bundles up these exact sites and segments: «What has been particularly overlooked in German media studies is that copper-based infrastructures, such as telegraphy and railways, along with an extractivist view of photography, have led to separations and appropriations of pre-colonial economies, times, and spaces. The globally expanding copper network violently connected mines like Tsumeb, transforming them into extraction sites and becoming a starting point for this network.» (translation by me from the unpublished dissertation, p.9-10, book is forthcoming with Campus Verlag in German, Gramlich 2024) Soil becomes the infrastructure of mobility. And mobility, as the potential or ability to move, is truly about the meaning, practices and experiences of moving. To that effect, in her essay «Learning from the Atacama» (2021) where she reflects on the landscapes of the Atacama desert, Chile, Orit Halpern explores the intersections of mining, astronomy, and mathematics in shaping our technological and environmental futures while marking the desert's history as a site of violence and resistance. Halpern notes: «Resource limitations and catastrophic environmental events are no longer understood as crisis necessitating a response through expertise and Milton Friedman fiscal policies, but rather as ongoing processes that can be incrementally experimented with and addressed through endless adjustments and manipulations in time and data collection.» (Halpern 2021) Mobility, it has become apparent, is its own mobility. Its capacity to move, change, and adapt, creates a recursivity: stories emerge within or out of stories, where elements refer back to previous or downstreamed parts in the same story instead of simulating a single isolated narrative – for every story. It is this recursivity that is performed through Cohen’s and Van Balen’s works. The mine is the site of materialized mobility. As a metaphor as well as an analogy, political geographer Martin Arboleda writes: «(...) I have argued that the coming of age of the planetary mine brings with it the pressing need to conceptualize capitalist society as an organic whole, not as an aggregation of national economies. The industrialization of the global South, coupled with the technological and industrial upgrading taking place across East Asia, requires a conceptual apparatus that can capture the transformation of capitalism into a genuinely global—not merely Western—form of social mediation.» (2020: 118)
All that is solid melts into flow.
[1]Relation is one of the most circulated concepts of Glissant, most famously quoted after his 1990 publication Poétique de la Relation (Paris: Gallimard; Poetics of Relation 2010, Michigan: Michigan UP): «The world’s poetic force (its energy), kept alive within us, fastens itself by fleeting, delicate shivers, onto the rambling prescience of poetry in the depths of our being. The active violence of reality distracts us from knowing it. (…) The expression of this force and its way of being is what we call Relation: what the world makes and expresses of itself.» (p. 159-160)
Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen (UK/BE, b.1981, based in London) work across objects, installation and film to explore processes of production as cultural, personal and political practices. Their work was recently exhibited at Ghost 2565, Bangkok; The Serpentine Galleries, London; The 13th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Para Site, Hong Kong; HKW in Berlin and Congo International Film Festival, Goma. It is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and M+ Museum, Hong Kong. Their monograph Not What I Meant but Anyway was published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City (2022.)
LITERATURE
