For An Oil Free Future is a mini-series of protest videos against fossil fuel prospection and extraction (oil and natural gas) off the Portuguese coast (offshore) and in land (onshore) through fracking. Synopsis: In a dystopian future in which oil extraction has become a catastrophic reality in Portugal, a citizen-journalist looks back and questions how it was possible to go ahead with such plans. Over the last few years, and particularly in 2015 under the former PSD/CDS-PP right-wing government, several contracts were signed between the Portuguese State and major oil companies (Galp, Partex, Repsol, Eni, Australis, Cosmos and the controversial Portfuel). The matter ...

A map of contamination and poisoning by agrochemicals, chemical products such as herbicides and pesticides, in Brazil has finally been published. Since 2008, Brazil is the country that consumes the most agrochemicals in the world. In the period between 1999 and 2009, for example, around 62,000 cases of poisoning by agrochemicals were reported. If land expropriation and labor exploitation are the visible side of the violence associated with the agribusiness, poisoning is its invisible side. Geografia do Uso de Agrotóxicos no Brasil e Conexões com a União Europeia is a project coordinated by Larissa Mies Bombardi, geographer at the University of ...

Sonic Continuum (Mar 2020 – July 2021) traces practices of world-making through sound, both as a force that constitutes the world and a medium for producing knowledge about it.

Switzerland plays a central role in the global commodity trade with gold and especially in its refining. Having fueled early modern industrialization as well as contemporary finance, Swiss trading and refining activities have influenced vivid cultural, affective and moral economies. They have contributed to Swiss wealth, but also to national narratives of independence, safety and white supremacy. The volume follows the entanglements of the global metabolism of gold by tracking down the elusive and often invisible paths of molecules, affects and violence: Swiss Psychotropic Gold.

What is Deep Sea Mining? Episode 1: Tools for Ocean Literacy is a cartographical survey of technologies that have contributed to ocean literacy and seabed mapping. Structured around a single shot along a vertical axis, the episode inquires about deep sea mining and the types of geologic formations where it is set to occur, particularly hydrothermal vents. Understanding the process of deep sea mining demands not only a temporal investigation – its main dates, legal and corporate landmarks, and scientific breakthroughs – but also a spatial axis connecting the seafloor to outer space cartographic technologies. After all, we know less about ...

Written by anthropologist Stefan Helmreich, What is Deep Sea Mining? Episode 2: Deep Frontiers is a brief history about knowledge of the deep sea and its resources. It highlights the ambiguity of this history, as depictions of the deep changed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Today, this knowledge informs discussions about the commercialization of biological and geological resources, with the deep sea fast becoming a zone of international dispute, opening up a debate about sustainable practices at sea. What is Deep Sea Mining? is a five episode web series dedicated to the topic of deep sea mining, a new frontier of resource extraction ...

The third episode of the web series What is Deep Sea Mining? is set on the Azores archipelago, an autonomous region of Portugal located in the North Atlantic Ocean. Composed of nine volcanic islands that once thrived on the whaling industry, the Azores have since become a hot spot for research in marine biology due to its diverse ecosystems, as it is located above an active triple junction between the Eurasian, African, and North-American tectonic plates. In 2008, one year before Portugal submitted its proposal to extend its continental shelf to the United Nations, the Canadian mining company Nautilus Minerals Inc. presented a ...

For the last two years we have been investigating deep sea mining, in an effort to both inform about and help to preempt this, for now hypothetical, industry. The jump from speculation to reality is, however, short. One could say that there is no deep sea mining industry. Rather, what is being pushed is a discourse, a language, and an imaginary (a speculation), creating the conditions for financial interests to establish this new economic frontier as unavoidable. Throughout this period of investigation, talking to different sources and reading from articles and documents ranging from economics and mining to biology and geology, ...