From the development of human settlements on the Moon to the asteroid mining of rare minerals and metals, the wild imaginaries of extraction-driven growth have, quite literally, transcended the boundaries of the Earth. This displacement of resource exploitation from the exhausted Earth to its ‘invisible’ backstages—celestial bodies, planets, and ultimately, the Moon itself—calls for an urgent debate on the impact this shift will have on our understanding of land, resources, and commons. Down to Earth critically unpacks the project of space mining through the perspective of resources, offering another way of seeing the Moon: that which goes beyond the current optics of the Anthropocene.
A frontier is an edge of space and time: a zone of not yet—not yet mapped, not yet regulated. It is a zone of unmapping: even in its planning, a frontier is imagined as unplanned. Frontiers are not just discovered at the edge; they are projects in making geographical and temporal experiences. Their ‘wildness’ is made of visions and vines and violence; it is both material and imaginative. Frontiers reach backward as well as forward in time energizing old fantasies, even as they embody their impossibilities. On the resource frontier, the small and the great collaborate and collide in a climate of chaos and violence. They wrest landscape elements from previous livelihoods and ecologies to turn them into wild resources, available for the industries of the world.
Tsing, Anna. Natural Resources and Capitalist Frontiers. Economic and Political Weekly 38, no. 48 (2003): 5100–5106, 5101.
Geology is a racialized optic razed on the earth.
Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
The mine is not a discrete socio-technical object but a dense network of territorial infrastructures and spatial technologies vastly dispersed across space.
Arboleda, Martín. Planetary Mine. Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 2020.
The mine is (...) subterranean spatiality that is always under pressure from the weight of the division of surface and underground states. Yet, the underground is also the possibility and spatial autonomy of opacity in plain sight. It is somewhere to dig in and plot.
Yusoff, Kathryn. Mine as Paradigm. E-Flux Architecture, June 2021.
How is life defined when it is seemingly inert, no longer a verb but instead a hardened substance in states of arrested suspension?
Roosth, Sophia. Life, Not Itself: Inanimacy and the Limits of Biology. Grey Room, no. 57 (2014): 56–81, 58.
In order for space to become the new high frontier, it must be literally constructed as a site. There is no pre-existing there. Once space has been reconceived as a series of surfaces in the void—sites of the future holes for resource extraction or future habitats and platforms for the production of life—then the older patterns of thinking and behavior begin to reassert themselves.
Scharmen, Fred. Space Settlements. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019: 128.
When we characterize outer space as a frontier, our perspective from Earth is erased, and with it, all the lessons we might learn from the spaces and outcomes of resource frontiers on Earth.
Klinger, Julie Michelle. Space Is Not the Final Frontier. New Geographies, no. 11 (2019): 34–38, 35.
As on Earth, resource abundance alone does not resolve struggles for control over and access to mineral resources, their benefits, or the politics of sacrifice on which most mining enterprises are built. Quite to the contrary: resource abundance—and our valuation of a given body of resources—creates the very struggles off-Earth mining proponents promise to overcome.
Klinger, Julie Michelle. Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018: 201.
With solar engineering and space fuel on the horizon, how might we partner up with dust, protest with dust, and counter an acceleration toward colonialist technofutures on- and off-earth?
Ng, Amelyn, Unsettling the Ground, How to: Mind the Moon, Luxembourg Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale and and Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2023.
Cosmic solidarity: solar politics, which breaks the promethean vicious circle of worship and extractivism, begins from the recognition that the sun is neither a master nor a slave. The sun is a comrade. (...) The strategy for solar politics will therefore not be colonization, but decolonization, not only of human societies, but also of terrestrial and celestial landscapes and communities:
it is never too early to start decolonizing the sun.
Timofeeva, Oxana. Solar Politics. Cambridge: polity, 2022.
Down to Earth, Luxembourg Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale
Curators: Francelle Cane and Marija Marić
Commissioners appointed by the Ministry of Culture of Luxembourg:
Kultur | lx – Arts Council Luxembourg luca – Luxembourg Center for Architecture
Collaborators: Lev Bratishenko and Armin Linke
Contributors: Jane Mah Hutton, Anastasia Kubrak, Amelyn Ng, Bethany Rigby, Fred Scharmen
Visual identity: OK-RM Publisher of the book: Spector Books
Advisory Board: Marc Angélil, Giovanna Borasi, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Florian Hertweck, Nikolaus Hirsch, Olaf Grawert, Markus Miessen, Dubravka Sekulić, Bettina Steinbrügge
All visual materials presented as this archive belong exclusively to their authors and are used here solely for educational purposes.
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