Project Description
EXTRACTION confronts the dual layers of exploitation artists often face: the self-exploitation required to make art, and the unconscious exploitation of others through the act of “taking” (field recordings, imagery, interviews, materials). It is an exploration of how we, as artists, deplete our own financial, physical, spiritual, and psychic resources to manifest work—and how these acts are inextricably linked to the global systems that extract from unseen laborers and landscapes.
The project investigates how artistic production is entangled with broader extractivist dynamics: the mining and manufacturing of materials, the consumption of goods enabled by exploited labor, and the often-compromised funding sources (public and private) that may be directly or indirectly tied to militarized economies and global inequities.
The Extraction project has manifested as a reading group, a series of talks and conversations, interviews and podcasts, the development of a series of animacy scores, a VR exhibit entitled Entanglements, a residency on non-extractive creative processes, a compendium of tactics for field recording and site specific workshops
Conceptual Framework
EXTRACTION expands the term extractivism—typically used to describe environmental processes of mineral, gas, and water extraction in Latin America—to encompass broader exploitative phenomena. These include, but are not limited to, the extraction of creative labor from precarious bodies, the harvesting of sounds, words, and images from sentient beings, the “mining of the exotic” for content and branding, and the commodification of our own identities and experiences within new cultural economies.
Through our Research We ask:
- What problematics arise from extraction in artistic and collaborative processes?
- How can we name and resist extractive dynamics instead of erasing them?
- What are the limitations of the extractivist framework?
- Can we find reciprocal relationships between artists, subjects, and nature?
Background & Origins
A key inspiration for EXTRACTION emerged during fieldwork at a rock quarry in Apricena, Italy. There, the scarred landscape served as a stark metaphor: a site of beauty and violence that illuminated our complicity as artists in extractivist capitalism. This fieldwork included the collection of sounds, images, and writing, which now serve as material and metaphor in our creative process.
