NEW MINERAL COLLECTIVE (Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė)
New Mineral Collective describes itself as “the largest and least productive mining company in the world”, operated by artists Emilia Škarnulytė and Tanya Busse. They aim to challenge the extractive industry using alternative approaches such as desire, body mining, and acts of counter prospecting. The concept of counter prospecting seeks to re-frame and also resist the impacts of expropriation, exploitation and nature extraction. Can we extract meaning instead of just material? Rather than simply depleting the earth’s resources, how can we foster imagination and explore new possibilities?
New Mineral Collective will exhibit the film Pleasure Prospects, commissioned for the 1st Toronto Biennial. The film comments on the patriarchal structure of extracting and prospecting the earth, and the need for a counter perspective to extractivism. “Penetration is our destination” recites the arctic drilling corporation. How to read the earth surface, not as a skin, forever penetrable, vulnerable, viable, gendered but as a surface? How to pierce the violence and not the surface?
Pleasure Prospects reimagines the process of acquiring prospecting licenses, challenging the traditional extractive mindset. It promotes a reparative approach focused on desire, love, poetry, and resistance rather than relentless productivity. The New Mineral Collective advocates for “unproductivity” to halt environmental destruction, acknowledging the existing damage and seeking to transform harmful narratives.
New Mineral Collective (NMC) is a platform run by Emilija Škarnulytė (born in Vilnius, Lithuania; lives in Tromsø, Norway) & Tanya Busse (born in Moncton, NB, Canada; lives in Tromsø, Norway) that looks at contemporary landscape politics to better understand the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface. As an organism, NMC infiltrates the extractive industry with alternative forces such as desire, body mining and acts of counter prospecting. Their work has been shown nationally and internationally, including SIART Bolivia International Art Biennial, Artists’ Film International Season 7, organized by Whitechapel Gallery; the first Toronto Art Biennial; SeMA Seoul Museum of Art; On Earth, Structure and Sadness, at Serpentine Galleries, UK; the Swedish Center for Architecture and Design, Stockholm; and most recently as part of Swimming Pool: Troubled Waters, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin
More info > www.newmineralcollective.com
