Photoessay related to the “Prospecting Ocean” project

The deep ocean floor is currently being explored for its rich reserves, including manganese, polymetallic nodules, cobalt crusts, gold, copper, and rare-earth elements. This rush to exploit deep-sea resources is driven by increasing prices and demand for minerals amid the so-called green transition. The threat of industrial mining comes at a time of growing awareness of the fragility of the hydrosphere, which ensure the survival of the planet thanks to its regulating functions and biodiversity. Along with the mostly Indigenous communities directly affected by deep-sea mining, ecologists, marine biologists, and activists are vehemently calling for a decisive ban on commercial deep-sea mining and for different ways of engaging with the oceans.

Armin Linke’s long-term research commission Prospecting Ocean investigates the technocratic entanglement of industry, science, politics, and economy at the new frontier of ocean extractivism in the deep seabed. With an essayistic sensibility, Linke explores questions of legislation and the distribution of and trade in prospecting licenses; the patenting of recombinant enzymes and DNA polymerases; the work processes in laboratories and research facilities; the validation of scientific research findings; the setting of ethical standards and the concerns of the activist resistance movements that have formed to protect the marine zones. The project vividly illustrates how asymmetric power dynamics orchestrate oceanic extractivism, causing political conflicts that extend across the sea and land. Driven by the libidinal economies of extractivist capitalism and market interests, mining in the deep is a genuine casus belli with unpredictable and potentially catastrophic consequences, undermining sovereign powers in favor of private interests.

Each of the eleven photographs on view highlights a different angle of the entangled realities associated with deep-sea mining. These include a large display case at the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Kingston, Jamaica, containing a manganese nodule; the main Assembly Room at the same institution; a freezer preserving the genome archive of the Prochlorococcus bacteria at MIT; other marine research institutions; and protests by affected communities, marching against a planned (and aborted) deep-sea mining project in the Bismarck Sea, Karkar Island, Papua New Guinea. Together they form a kaleidoscope of behind-the-scenes impressions captured during Linke’s research and attempts to create a poly-perspectival understanding of the issues and processes at stake.

Humanity is currently facing a decisive turning point. While the ISA is negotiating legislation regarding the extraction of metals in the areas of the oceans considered to be the common heritage of humankind, there is a consensus among scientists that the damages caused to the surrounding hyper-fragile ecosystems are unpredictable and potentially catastrophic. All of which is the result of what Macarena Gómez-Barris has described as “an [extractivist] economic system that engages in thefts, borrowings, and forced removals, violently reorganizing social life as well as the land by thieving resources from Indigenous and Afro-descendent territories.”

(Text written by TBA21 and used as wall label in the exhibition "The Ecologies of Peace", C3A, Córdoba, 2024)