Is it possible to decolonise mineral collections? How might our understanding of mineralogy support climate activism or anti-racist methodologies?
For the second part of our double bill with co-founder Niamh Schmidtke, we are listening to the final half of Pulling Blood from a Stone, a 35 minute radio play. Alberto Duman joins us as co-presenter, addressing key questions in act 3 and 4 about how minerals might hold kinship with specific places or peoples affected colonisation. Diving into Tsumeb, Namibia, in the early 1900s, and a near future in Berlin, these two acts are voiced by minerals which want to fight against oppressive colonists, and the impact of geology’s categorisation of their elements. We touch on how anthropomorphising such rocks can help share their stories and rebellions. This also becomes a way to unpick the roles of these beings within our technology, such as in batteries and the ways their voices might be heard through a miners’ strike, the shattering of stones in oxygen or the rise and fall of mountains.
Pulling Blood from a Stone is part of the Earth Water Sky Environmental Sciences and Art Research, Commissioning and Production Programme curated by Ariane Koek and funded by Fondation Didier et Martine Primat to whom we give grateful thanks.
Artists @niamhschmidtke
Host @ellaberto @influential_bro
Music @jtre_v
Broadcast through @rtm.fm
Niamh Schmidtke (b.1997, Dublin) explores the political complications of ‘being green’ by cultivating conversations with the environment, through speculation, audio, ceramics and installations. They examine the relationship between listening and speaking, to consider the kinds of voices that deep time, the sea, or humans could have with one another. In 2023 they were the EARTH artist-in-residence at the Technological University of Berlin, with Science Gallery International, a research residency with the university’s mineral collection. Recent projects also include How to Harness the Wind (2023), a collection of 3D printed clay crystals mimicking those mined for wind turbine construction, funded by Arts Council Ireland, as part of the Hunt Museum’s, Night’s Candles are Burnt Out exhibition. Schmidtke is the SADP (formerly SAUL) artist in residence, researching local clays through workshops and lectures with students. They hold an MFA (Hons) from Goldsmiths, University of London (2021), and a Ba (Hons) from LSAD (2019). They have co-produced the radio show Future Artefacts FM with artist Nina Davies since 2021, receiving an Arts Council England National Lottery project grant, and funding from the Elephant Trust.
Alberto Duman is an artist, university lecturer and independent researcher whose work is situated between art, urban studies and social practice. He is interested in the cultural production of urban spaces, narratives and atmospheres, and the agency of art within the immaterial economy of this production.
In 2016 he was the Leverhulme Trust artist in residence at University of East London, where he produced the project Music for Masterplanning. In 2018, the co-edited anthology from the project 'Regeneration Songs: Sounds of Loss and Opportunity from East London' was published by Repeater Books.
He is Senior Lecturer in Fine Arts and Programme Leader for the MA Expanded Printmaking at Middlesex University in London, a convenor of the online course PILOT at Autograph and a member of the DIG Collective.
His ongoing project ‘Haunting the Future City’ is developing through educational spaces, films, exhibitions, ‘talking ghosts’ collective writing workshops, conference presentations and building up towards a PhD at Kings College London, Human Geography department.
