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 will be the publication of a special issue in Geoforum (expected in 2025) co-edited with Henrik Ernstson (KTH - Royal Institute of Technology). From the outlook of human geography, political ecology, and the environmental humanities, the special issue explores the Global South as a worldwide provider and consumer of nature and energy commodities and as a location of experience and resistance organized in relation to and beyond capitalist extraction. The notion of the archive is rethought as a record, under diverse practices and multicultural formats, of the events that constitute our socioenvironmental crises. Studies include how lithium extraction in Argentina consists of a twofold extractive frontier of nature and data; the tracing of geo-historicities of rare-earth minerals in Greenland under the rubric of the energy transition; and the use of fire, land clearing, and deforestation as an extractivist method in Bolivia. But also studies on how contestation and radical politics are articulating emancipatory subjects of the planetary mine, including an embodied mode of being in the world in the face of the neoliberal commodification of mineral-rich Andean commons; art activism to denounce and deconstruct extractivism and new cartographies of refusing extraction in South Africa and Brazil.

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).