Archives of the Planetary Mine is a collaborative project that explores the intersections between culture, materiality, politics, energy consumption, and extractivism across the Global South. By emphasizing this transnational aspect, the project highlights the relevance of cross-discussions to understand the global apparatus of nature and energy commodification in connection with located and situated cultural and social practices. We organized an international workshop (Stockholm, November 14-15, 2022) where participants analyzed and historicized the relations between culture and politics, extractivism, and energy from the outlook of material, textual, visual, and politico-economic case studies.

The first outcome was the publication of a special issue in Geoforum co-edited with Henrik Ernstson (KTH Royal Institute of Technology). This Special Issue critically addresses the current geohistorical and socioecological magnitude of energy consumption and the radical politics, territorial, and social configurations around nature extraction in an expanded understanding of the global South. From the outlook of political ecology and the environmental humanities, it explores the global South as a worldwide provider and consumer of nature and energy commodities and as a location of experience and resistance organised in relation to, and beyond, capitalist extraction. The notion of the archive is rethought as a register, under diverse material practices and multicultural formats, of the events that constitute the socioenvironmental crisis.

This project has been supported by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (Stiftelsen Riksbankens jubileumsfond)and The Situated Ecologies Platform, art, design, and research collaborations to contest and democratise ecologies with funds from KTH Royal Institute of Technology’s Department of Sustainable Development, Environmental Science and Engineering (SEED).