Framer Framed

– a contextual conversation led by Susanne Eskens, with artist Kim Bouvy, writer/filmmaker Renée Mboya and researcher/curator Margaret Tali.

To most of us, the mines may feel like distant historical incidents, but to some the memories are still vivid. Very sporadically we come across media reports on blood diamonds from Sierra Leone, mining incidents in Turkey or the heightened conflicts with indigenous people in India.  To a degree, the relationship between commodification of a landscape and the transformation in patterns of consumption that mining and mining revenues may bring about is affecting us all visibly. Since, across the globe mining industries have fueled everything from popular cultures, urbanization, gentrification, industrialization to migration. Simultaneously, the work within the mine industries often remain invisible and ‘underground’, comparable to other undervalued or erased forms of labor, such as sex work, which are hidden in plain sight. In what ways are bodies and forms of labor deliberately confined to the margins of cities and countries?

Mining, Memories and the Body addresses the politics and poetics of changing industries, such as mining. During this discursive event we look at how we are constantly redefining the spatial peripheries and how these changes affect urban, conflict, memories and cultural landscapes, as well as the labour and everyday lives of ‘marginalized’ people.  Additionally, we examine subject positions and bodies that are mobilized as capital, both bottom-up (by individuals themselves) and top-down (by society, institutions). How are these bodies instrumentalized to fulfill particular needs in a continuously changing society? Mining and Memories is also an exploration of the historical memory and the role of culture in documenting, responding and interpreting histories.

Artist Melanie Bonajo (1978) was born as the daughter of a Slovenian mineworker in the south of the Netherlands. Her work consists of videos, photographs, performances and installations. Her latest film Night Soil – Economy of Love is an experimental documentary on a new movement of sex work activists in Brooklyn.