Mining Modernity: Aesthetics with/out Extraction
The symposium Mining Modernity will explore how modernity was mined in ecologically precarious nature and examine how the exploitation of extractive materials was designed into the material culture of the late 19th and early 20th century. Industrial modernity quickly learned that the materials needed to feed the factories had to be sourced far beyond the limited geography of the manufacturing centers, thus implicating design culture in the colonial world order and processes of globalization. The mining industries have a long and multifarious history intertwined with transnational manufacturing networks, but this has not been connected to the history of design culture. To address this historiographical blind spot, which is fully in line with the general invisibility of raw materials in the history of design, Mining Modernity will trace materials extracted from nature during the second industrial revolution, with an emphasis on how their exploitation and consumption became an integral feature of modern design practices and material cultures.
Please register by 10 April.
Provisional Programme (subject to change)
10:30-10:45
Welcome by Kjetil Fallan (Professor at University of Oslo, NO) and Ingrid Halland (Associate Professor at University of Bergen, NO)
10:45-11:15
Emily Jane Cockayne (Associate Professor, early modern history at University of East Anglia, UK): Nineteenth-Century Plastics: Alchemy, Alterity and Artificiality
11:15-11:45
Helene Engnes Birkeli (Postdoc, art history at University of Bergen, NO): Speculation, Fusion and Dispersal: Cobalt Blue Circulations in the Danish Empire
11:45-12:15
Elín Margot Ármannsdóttir (PhD Fellow, design history at University of Oslo, NO): Tracking Matter: Norwegian aluminium’s travel between 1929-1936
12:15-13:15
Lunch
13:15-13:45
Anna-Maria Hällgren (Associate Professor, art history at Umeå University, SE): Unearthing Aesthetics: Mining, Art and Visual Culture in Northen Sweden Around 1900
13:45-14:15
Denise Bertschi (Artist and scholar (Dr. sc.), Visiting Lecturer at Department of History of the University of Zurich, SUI): Colors of Colonial Chemistry: Dye Materialities Between Science, Industry, and Colonisation
14:15-14:45
Coffee break
14:45-15:15
Nicolas Maffei (Reader in design history at Norwich University of the Arts, UK): Metal Morals: Stainless Histories of American Design
15:15-16:15
Taylor Alaina Liebenstein Smith (Artist and researcher, US/FR) and Thomas McQuillan (Professor, architecture at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, NO): Langøya: Lifelines and Catalysts of an Island-Hole
16:15-16:30
Questions and discussion
16:30
End