HREEs

LREEs

Germanium

Borate

Strontium

Natural Graphite

Bauxite

Indium

Lithium

Coking coal

Flourspar

Baryte

Gallium

Hafnium

Tantalum

Silicon

Phosphate rock

Natural rubber

Titanium

Vanadium

Antimony

Bismuth

Berylium

PGMs

Cobalt

Tungsten

Scandium

Phosphorous

Niobium

Magnesium

Supply risk

Economic importance

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Research

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Tuna Watch Tower

Wyngaerde-1567 View of Zahara Catching tuna

Wyngaerde-1567-Ansichten spanischer Städte-left

Wyngaerde 1567 Ansichten spanischer Städte-right

Reguart 1791 Diccionario histórico pesca nacional

Reguart 1791 Diccionario histórico pesca nacional night

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Genealogy

In the 14th century, the Sahara was a hotbed of cultural exchange thriving with caravan trade. Establishing a different model at the time, Europeans began colonising the nearby islands of Madeira and the Canaries, initiating sugar plantations (that would establish the model for later implementation in the Americas), and the decimation of local indigenous populations such as the Guanche. The consequent shortage of labour on the islands motivated raids (slave hunting expeditions) along the neighbouring Western Saharan coast for two centuries often referred to as “entradas” or “cabalgadas”. In 1479, the Treaty of Alcáçovas-Toledo officialised the Crown of Castille’s rights over Boujdour (in Western Sahara) up to Agadir (in Morocco). For decades Portugal and Castille disputed over raid and fishing rights, or what Lino Camprubí has called “resource-based sovereignty”, which was temporarily resolved by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 in which territory and water rights were separated between the two crowns. Later in 1860, Morocco’s defeat to Spain, decreed in the Ouad Ras treaty between the Kingdoms, granted the victor the right to establish a fishery off the coast of a previous settlement in Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequeña (now Sidi Ifni in Western Sahara). In 1884, at the Berlin Conference, Spain’s claim over Western Sahara was granted (in which it was mainly interested for its fishing potential). Thus, the right to fish in waters neighbouring present day Morocco and Western Sahara have been a source of contention and desire with various European powers, notably Spain and Portugal, for several centuries.
With the end of the civil war in Spain in 1939, marked by Franco’s victory, long-distance industrial fishing made a big leap with the implementation of the Naval Credit Act. The latter provided low-cost credit for fishing fleet construction and renewal with long-term repayment schemes. As a result, the fleet radically increased in size, and with it overfishing along the Spanish coasts.
It is in this context that extraterritorial fishing is presented as a solution to overexploited waters and begins to explain how Spain became the largest fleet in Europe.

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NO-DO

DOC COL La industria naval española al servicio de la pesca 2

DOC COL La industria naval española al servicio de la pesca 3

DOC COL La industria naval española al servicio de la pesca 5

DOC COL La industria naval española al servicio de la pesca 6

DOC COL La industria naval española al servicio de la pesca 7

DOC COL La industria naval española al servicio de la pesca 1

DOC COL La industria naval española al servicio de la pesca 4

DOC COL La industria naval española al servicio de la pesca 8

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Francoist Archaeology

1936 Provincial Museum of Alicante post Spanish Civil War

1944 Santa-Olalla Western Sahara Ceramics

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Jable Rubio

Jable Rubio (yellow sand), is the name historically given to the sand that blows from the Saharan desert over to the Canary Islands and beyond. Nearly every year, large volumes reaches the South American continent, feeding the Amazonian forest with phosphorous, as this aggregate is ultimately derived from remains of ancient marine life. Considerable volumes also reach central and north-east Europe. As plumes passed France, Switzerland, or Sweden, they deposit traces of traces of French nuclear tests in the Sahara in the early 1960s in form of Cesium-37.

During the Francoist period, besides phosphate for fertilizer, or fishing grounds for an ever-expanding fishing fleet, large volumes of high-quality jable were imported from the Spanish Sahara colonies into the Islands of Tenerife or Las Palmas. Sand was initially employed for early truck-crop production of sand-bed tomato and banana plantations—a native farming technique from the desert island of Lanzarote which was later rolled over the export-oriented greenhouse region of El Ejido (Almeria). In a 1958 copy of the magazine Falange: Diario de la Tarde, a feat of Lanzarote local agriculture was worth noting in the caption of photo, disguising a 2 kg onion as a masterpiece of still life:
“No es un bodegón. El contenido de esta imagen pudiera parecer a primera vista la reproducción de una obra de arte pictórico. Pues no señor, no (sic) es, ni mas ni menos, que el voluminoso ejemplar de cebolla obtenido en tierra de secano de la isla de Lanzarote, que peso 2.04 kilogramos, y que actualmente se exhibe en una exposición de la capital tinerfeña.” [It is not a still life. At first glance, the content of this image may appear to be an admirable work of fine art. Well, no sir no, it is no other than a voluminous specimen of onion, grown in unirrigated land in the island of Lanzarote, that weighs 2.04 kilograms, and currently being exhibited in an exhibition in the Tenerife.]

Later on, and at the midst of Spain’s fasticised modernity, white Saharan sand was mixed in concrete for the urban re-development of most islands of the archipelago. More importantly, this sand lined the beaches of Mogan or Tauro/Taurito in Las Palmas, or Las Teresitas in Tenerife. These geo-engineered seashore, in fact containing the world largest artificial beaches, transformed the rocky strands of traditional fishing and small holding communities into tourism heavens of eternal spring. on the African continent, but of European soil. Even now, beaches of most islands are regularly replenished with sand from the Western Sahara. The last sand shipment arrived to Mogan beach (Gran Canarias), on December 2019, as documented by Western Sahara Resource Watch (2019). The mining of Western Saharan sand started since the territory was incorporated as a Spanish Province—effectively a colony under the name of ‘Spanish Sahara’).

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Garden of Hesperides

1770 Cattoir Freudenberg Orotava Gardens

1838 Barker Webb Berthelot Phytogeography Palma

1857 Hartung geology Lanzarote Fuerteventura

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Tourism

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Bou Craa Mine

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Phosphates

Fosiles devonicos Sahara Rodriguez Mellado 1948

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Western Sahara / Spanish Sahara

Jamas sacamos de aqui el mas minimo beneficio material y os hemos dado en cambio cuando hemos podido.
[We never get the slightest material benefit from here and we have given you instead everything we could.] (Carrero Blanco May 16th, 1966)

Nuevas 'jaimas' de ladrillo y cemento, dotadas de todos los servicios, se alzan ahora en el desierto en zonas perfectamente urbanizadas. La civilización exige bases sedentarias.
[Brand new brick and concrete tents, equipped with all modern amenities, are now rising in the desert in perfectly urbanized areas. Civilization demands sedentary foundations.]
(Estalella 1966)

The first locution by Admiral Carrero Blanco (Sub-secretary Minister for the Government Presidency) at a 1966 visit to Laâyoune, as well the following from one of the leading urbanists and architects of the regime, encapsulates the masquerading of resource extraction (and occupation) under a thick veil of altruistic development. Countering such narrative, Yolanda Aixelà-Cabré denounces the large public works and infrastructural efforts as form of "historiographical invisibility" for Spanish African colonialism promoted by Francisco Franco.

Under the pressure of rising decolonisation, the regime initiated alternative modes of occupation to maintain the extraction of valuable resources. The earliest efforts to assimilate nomadic populations entailed forcible eviction from traditional grazing grounds and/or trading routes, immediately followed by the aggresive promotion of sedentary settlements away from resource rich areas. As part of this process, cabilas (indigenous tribal organisations) were disarmed and passes/IDs issued for communities crossing the borders between the French and Spanish occupied territories. The French franc and the Spanish peseta were later introduced as official currencies thereby creating a necessity to enter into labour- and resource-oriented relations to obtain means of settling the payment of taxes (a scheme was largely deployed in Sub-saharan Africa by France).

The imposition of administrative structures in Ifni and (what was then called) Spanish Sahara provinces was later compounded by the creation of experimental urban plans, the construction of harbours, airports and markets. As a way to further entice nomadic communities into sedentary settlements, newly established colonies expressely included indigenous elements into the spatial and decorative design, which included schemes like rent-limited public housing. Spain’s African colonies offered mainland architects, urbanists, and ultimately Spanish modernity at large a fertile ground for experimentation. It is no accident that the first ever modern Spanish General Urban Plan by Pedro Muguruza - celebrated for being the first implementating zoning laws - was not for the Spanish Capital, but rather Tetuan in the African Protectorate.

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Dovecotes

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Arboriculture

1756 Marques Victoria Arquitectura Naval

1780 du Monceau semis et plantations royal marks

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Forestry

The financialisation and valuation of forests and forest resources can be seen as one of the foundations of western political power as much as its effacement. Forests once marked the limit of sovereignty, the areas of productive economy and with it the threshold of the law. In the late middle Ages, when the forest became the foundation of political power, “the impending wood shortage became an increasingly effective instrument of politics” (Radkau 2012, 139).[4] ‘Forest laws’ designated grounds reserved to the royal houses and aristocracy for hunting. Afforestation was a cruel, despotic instrument of dispossession to forcibly evict and invalidate ancient freedoms and common rights such as communal land- and water-uses. The latter is echoed in the Great Partition (1757-1827), an umbrella for several agricultural land reforms enforced in Sweden and Finland (part of Sweden at the time) by the Swedish Empire (Storskiftet and later Enskiftet and Laga skiftet in Swedish or Isojako in Finnish).

The wider global trend towards financialisation and the switch from agricultural to monetary economies emphasises notions of ‘exchange value’. Eino Saari (1894-1971) is said to be one of the founders of forest economics in Finland. He pioneered the first national wood utilization survey in the world – the birth of forest valuation. This could be understood as the development of biological-mensurational research which enables the application of economic theory and facts to biological and technical conceptions. In 1966, Kullervo Kuusela of the Finnish Forest Research Institute stated: “the age of planned development of forest resources is about to begin” (Edwards 1968, 155). Kuusela’s statement points to the importance of early national wood utilization surveys within a genealogy of ecosystem services.

Central to planned development is forest modelling, one of the oldest forms of mathematization of risk calculation and the calculation of ‘worth’. The birth of forest valuation is, according to the economist John Maynard Keynes, the link between the present and the future, the latter being “perfidious” and threatening (Esposito 2011, 11). Industrial forestry thus conquers the perfidious future through planned harvest, determined maturity, yield calculation and other predictions. Forest modelling, in its conquest to assuage future uncertainties, systematises the forest as a set of variables within a formula, forever optimising itself, thus paving the way for its financialisation.

Text excerpt from:
Gallardo, Francisco, and Audrey Samson. Carboniferous Capitalism. HIAP. https://www.
hiap.fi/carboniferous-capitalism1/. Published 2020. Accessed November 10, 2020.

2014 Keto-Tokoi Kuuluvainen Primeval Forests

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Tar

Jos ei viina, terva ja sauna auta, niin tauti on kuolemaksi.

(Finnish Proverb: If alcohol, tar and sauna do not help, then the disease is fatal)

An often overlooked ‘carbon derivative’ in the expropriation of land in the Americas is terva (pine tar), which was used as a wood preservative. Finnish pine tar (often referred to as Stockholm tar) is described in many archival exchanges between colonial powers as being the best both in quality and fabrication method (Kent 1973, 80).
Finland has historically been one of the most important providers of both timber and tar for many of its European neighbours’ pillaging ventures abroad. The fluctuation of the black gold’s resale value is linked to both the creation of a bourgeoisie (in Oulu), and to great famines (Kainuu region). The increase of timber value, also afforded by the demand of trading companies and naval fleets, afforded the switch from an agricultural to a monetary economy. These reforms are dubbed the ‘liberalization of Finland’ in the 1860s, which also coincide with the creation of the Finnish markka, and the beginning of a widening gap between forest owners and landless peasants (Toivanen 2018). These reforms also precipitated the ‘hunger lands’. One of the main factors in the great famine of 1867 killing hundreds of thousands, was the inability to finance cereal import because of the decrease in the price of pine tar (Toivanen and Kröger 2018). Pine tar thus brought the beginning of speculation, riches as well as extreme poverty to the country.
Pine tar today in Finland epitomises the complexities challenging the co-existence and development of traditional practices alongside a bureaucratic apparatus that privileges the logic of accumulation. Under EU law, terva is categorised as a chemical which requires a production permit costing 200,000EUR (Braunschweiler n.d.). The EU chemical definition was devised according to industrial production methods and scale. Small artisanal terva producers have to merge or collectivise to survive. While this traditional knowledge is under constant threat of disappearance under the EU’s legal framework, in former tar production and distribution areas (such as Oulu and Kainuu), pine tar festivals have emerged as a hipster-esque nostalgia of Finland’s past, dehistoricising its relationship to death, famine and speculation.

Text excerpt from:
Gallardo, Francisco, and Audrey Samson. Carboniferous Capitalism. HIAP. https://www.
hiap.fi/carboniferous-capitalism1/. Published 2020. Accessed November 10, 2020.

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Maypole

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Indulgences

“All things are saleable at Rome, -- temples, priests, altars, prayers, heaven, -- yea God himself”
-Mantuan, Lib. 3.

The Vatican had the monopoly of three notable resources during the early modern period: salt, alum and indulgences. Indulgences approximately date back to the third century. At that time, rather than ‘indulgences,’ they were named by Latin terms such as remissio, absolutio, and relaxatio. The beginning of the abuses in indulgence sales started with practices of returning stolen goods. Architectural historian François Icher explains, “thieves and holders of stolen goods were promised absolution and forgiveness on condition that they give up all or part of the goods they held illegally not to the rightful owners, but to the Church.” Redemption was another predecessor of indulgences, given as a reward for charitable actions.
Indulgeo, "to be kind or tender" in latin, derives from Roman Law and biblical sources. Indulgences are a 'quid pro quo', which used in English to mean an exchange of goods or services, in which one transfer is contingent upon the other. It implies remitting the punishment of sin for a price. It does not buy forgiveness, in fact it only lessens the penance imposed. In other words, an indulgence is a remission before God of the temporal punishment for sins, the guilt of which has already been forgiven. The absolution is obtained by a member of the Christian faith under certain and definite conditions with the help of the Church. As the minister of redemption, the Church dispenses redemption from the spiritual “treasury”. The process is roughly analogous to a civil court proceeding in which a person who pleads guilty receives a sentence or penalty from a judge. Judges can suspend the sentence or order community service in lieu of prison time. Granting an indulgence is comparable to commuting a sentence (a commutation is a reduction in sentence, not a pardon).
The intended disposition of an indulgence followed this rationale: the Christian Church was endowed with a spiritual “treasury” of the piteous works bankrolled by merits attributed to Holy figures such as Christ and saints. The Church acted as a bank, storing and distributing at discretion those 'merits'. An indulgence placed at the penitent's disposal from the aforementioned treasury designated retribution for their sinful act. They are often described similar to a “Utopian commonwealth where all the surplus wealth of the successful citizens should be set apart for the poor and needy, and portioned out to them according to their necessities”. In effect, a customary mode of thinking about this was that of 'governing by debt'. Believers would thus be bailed-out through retributory work such as making a pilgrimage, Crusade enrolling, almsgiving, or by performing special prayers. Since these alms provided much of the revenue needed for crusades, and later the costs to build New St. Peter’s, the exchange of indulgences for alms, later deemed “sales,” rose in the years prior to the Reformation. 'Salesmen' refers to those travelling business-priest men sermoning about the urgencies for indulgences. Again Icher explains that “while the building sites depended unquestionably on the rhythm of the seasons, they operated primarily according to the rhythm of money”.
Through the massive emission of indulgences, the Christian Caesar, a.k.a Pope, became the most formidable force in Europe – a prominent power player and art patron. Lorenzo Pucci stated that the mass runs of indulgences rolled off ecclesiastical printing presses. We could think of the Pope as the one-man Tate or MoMA, underwriting the best contemporary artists, using charm, threats, bribes, and flattery to commission the masterpieces of western civilisation. For the Saint Peter cathedral, Agostino Chigi proposed a financial plan: the granting of indulgences. He advised to set up a separate building fund for the basilica and grant an indulgence to anyone who made an annual contribution to it. This idea is similar to pledge drives today, receiving a reduced purgatory sentence. The term "pledge" originates from the promise that a contributor makes to send in funding at regular intervals for a certain amount of time. Prior to that indulgences were an accepted way to raise money for capital projects and charitable causes. The initial methods to finance Church construction was to cut costs, and thereafter to raise money through indulgences.
Both of the churches in Wittenberg were granted indulgences and a special indulgence was issued for the reliquary-museum, which the elector Frederick had collected. An indulgence of 100 days was attached to each of the 5,005 specimens and another 100 to each of the 8 passages between the cases that held them. With the 8,133 relics at Halle and the 42 entire bodies, millions and billions of days of indulgence were associated, a sort of anticipation of the geologic periods of modern demand. To be more accurate, these relics created pardons covering 39,245,120 years and 220 days, and the still further period of 6,540,000 quarantines, each of 40 days.
The main intent of Julius II’s bull 'Liquet omnibus', issued in 1510, was to generate great sums of money to build New St. Peter’s and draw the faithful to Rome. This bull set clear financial conditions to all Christians hoping to gain the indulgence. They were to “deposit in the chest the price determined by the commissioner or his delegates,” and the prices of indulgences were set according to their ability to pay. For instance, Archbishop Albert of Mainz and Magdeburg set the following standards: kings, princes and great prelates paid twenty-five Rhenish gold gulden for an indulgence; abbots, cathedral dignitaries and nobles paid ten gulden; lesser prelates, nobles, and traders with an income over five hundred gulden paid six gulden, burghers and merchants whose revenues were about two hundred gulden paid three gulden; and below these the amount paid was a half to one gulden. If one was too poor to pay anything, they were given other works, initially fasting or prayers, then indentured labour. It might be relevant to recall that labour constituted a great expense, approximately reaching forty percent of the construction budget in large architectural works.

Geologic time
In Rome, the residence of the supreme pontiffs, as we might well have expected, the offer of indulgences was the most copious. According to the Nürnberger relic-collector, Nicolas Muffel, every time the skulls of the Apostles were shown, or the handkerchief of St. Veronica, the Romans who were present received a pardon of 7,000 days, other Italians 10,000 and foreigners 14,000. In fact, the grace of the ecclesiastical authorities was practically boundless. Not only did the living seek indulgences, but even the dying stipulated in their wills that a representative should go to Assisi or Rome or other places to secure for their souls the benefit of the indulgences offered there.
Prayers also had remarkable offers of grace attached to them. According to the penitential book, The Soul’s Joy, the worshipper offering its prayers to Mary received 11,000 years indulgence and some prayers, if offered, freed 15 souls from purgatory and as many earthly sinners from their sins. It professed to give one of Alexander Vl.’s decrees, according to which prayer made three times to St. Anna secured 1,000 years indulgence for mortal sins and 20,000 for venial. The Soul’s Garden claimed that one of Julius II.’s indulgences granted 80,000 years to those who would pray the book’s prayer to the Virgin. No wonder Siebert, a Roman Catholic writer, is forced to say that "the whole atmosphere of the later Middle Ages was soaked with the indulgence-passion”.
Indulgences prevail today, they are namely included in the 1983 Code of Canon Law. Also, in 2013, Pope Francis issued indulgences via his Twitter account to those who followed his Twitter-feed during the World Youth Day event in Rio de Janeiro!

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Practice

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EU Policy Watch Tower

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Unclaimed Latifundium

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Map: to reap without sowing

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Ex-Post Re-evaluation Report

This document offers a spatial inquiry into the EU-Morocco Fisheries Partnerships (currently rebranded as ‘Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreement’), which was established under the auspices of the Euro-Mediterranean Agreement. Every such partnership is preceded by an EU commissioned evaluation report, and supposedly informs decisions taken by EU Parliament. For this case, the report showed that the cost-benefit analysis was detrimental to the EU, while highlighting the ecological damage to one of the world’s most prolific fishing grounds as well as its illegality, because of its inclusion of Western Sahara waters.

The controversial evaluation report of the EU-Morocco Fisheries Partnership Agreement (FPA) was also classified. Following the protocol of classified documents, the report was made available in a small room, adorned with a lightbulb, a chair, and a table. It was accessible only to members of the European Parliament’s Fisheries Committee, one person at a time, without phone, translator, assistant, or notepad. The document available for consultation, in French language only, offered a cost-benefit analysis, which showed that it was cheaper to pay Spanish fishing fleets to remain at port than to pay for accessing Moroccan fish stocks. It also outlined the devastating trawling and seining effects upon ‘extra-Mediterranean’ marine life. The rapporteur, Carl Haglund, states in his draft recommendation to the European Council’s Fisheries Committee that the “economical, ecological, environmental and procedural problems with the Agreement are so grave that they outweigh the possible counterargument for giving consent to the extension of the Protocol”. He also challenged the very legality of the agreement based on its lack of consultation with the people of Western Sahara whose waters are included in the partnership. Despite his unequivocal recommendation to discontinue the protocol, and the two European Court of Justice rulings stipulating that the FPA is not applicable to Western Sahara, the agreement has been extended twice since his report in 2011 and continues to this day under the amended title ‘Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreement’, still including Western Sahara. According to Ignacio Cembrero, former journalist at El País covering the Maghreb, the “European Commission discovered a means by which European ships were able to continue to fish in Saharan water - making 91% of catches - all whilst respecting, according to them, the spirit of the Court’s rulings”.

This revised document is an intervention into opaque EU processes, opening up possibilities for scrutiny and accountability towards the European Union and its extractive practices. It also begs the question, who benefits from the agreements which are neither lucrative for the EU, nor sustainably viable?

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Playa Taurito

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Playa Mogan

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EURion

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Phosphate Pigment

In collaboration with RADAR's ‘Risk Related’ programme, we have been exploring chemical fertiliser dependencies which stem from illegally mined phosphate (P₂O₅) in the Western Sahara.

Phosphate is listed twice in the EU CRM list, under 'Phosphate Rock' and 'Phosphorus'. Phosphorus is mainly made from Phosphate Rock, and Phosphate is made of Phosphorus atoms combined with Oxygen. Phosphate rock is a finite, non-manufacturable resource whose global demand was carved by the Green Revolution’s crave for synthetic fertilizer. It is now a resource critical for the normal operation of agrobusiness. 71% of the world’s fertiliser comes from Western Sahara, currently occupied by Morocco, mostly from the Bou Craa mine. Western Sahara was occupied by Morocco immediately after gaining independence from Spain in 1975. Franco's regime sold its occupied territories for fisheries' rights and phosphate operations in the Bou craa mines. The dependancy to this mineral is thus tightly embroiled with (im)possibility of self-determination for the Saharawi people, who have largely lived in exile, in camps along the Algerian border since 1975.

In addition to its use in fertiliser, phosphate is the basis of the phosphorus. According to VanZee and Khan (1976), the phosphorescent property of phosphorus is the oldest known chemiluminescing system. Phosphorus is also an essential mineral for the functioning of the human body (stored with calcium in bones). The phosphate mines are the result of very old marine life deposits (fossilised bone). Thus, phosphate embeds a unique set of qualities and inherent tensions; it can emit light under certain conditions, and it is essential to the possibility of life while being equally central to its precarity.

As a means of 'staying with the trouble' of conflict minerals, we have been working with Prof. Sandie Dann in the Chemistry Department of Loughborough University to develop a phosphorescent pigment made with the phosphate used in British fertiliser which is mined in Morocco (Bou Craa mine in Western Sahara) and Tunisia (Gafsa).

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Décollage

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Carbon Rifts

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Indulgentia

Indulgentia is a cryptocurrency developed with Guido Rudolphi, based on Ethereum blockchain, which facilitates trading of carbon credits. It reduces the amount of punishment one has to undergo for carbon emissions.
Indulgentia launched its initial coin offering with ‘Carbon Derivatives’ at the Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi in Venice on October 20th, 2017.
The Indulgence Coin engages with material and cultural discourses that legitimise green trade and the affective powers that emerge from it. The current epoch undergoing northern climate change and globalised anthropogenic impact can be putatively defined by the affective power embedded in flows of carbon and carbon derivatives: hydrocarbons fueling engines or metabolic processes, and financial trading systems such as green bonds, or emissions trading systems (ETS).

Utilising trees as carbon storage has the effect of abstracting their biological function to a commodity for the service economy, framing carbon as both material and economy. This argument facilitates the replacement of boreal forest by industrial forests, with more efficient carbon yield. In turn, these efficient storage sites increase a country’s collateral for the emissions trade.
This carbon market is contentiously emerging, while simultaneously destroying ecosystems and indigenous knowledge systems.

Indulgentia harnesses the power of the blockchain to offer a decentralised and anonymous approach to carbon trading, while exploring the relationship between speculation and carbon resources.

History of indulgentiārum
Indulgences were awarded by the Catholic Church as a remission of sin through a donation of money in the Middle Ages. The copious repenting of sinners funded the crusades (such as those against the ‘Turkish invasion’ of Venice) as well as the building of such monuments as the St Peter's Basilica. Indulgences are also the earliest dated printed European document by movable type, made possible by the Gutenberg press. The later printed indulgences as a side job while working on the Bible. It has been suggested by H.D.L. Vervliet that the invention of the press itself may have been prompted by the recognition of the need for large numbers of identical Indulgentia documents. With the printing of Indulgentia also emerged the automisation of labour rendering large amounts of scribes redundant.
Thus, the notion of capitalisation on repentance and deskilling labour is nothing new. Tried, tested and true, these have repeated throughout history and once again with carbon trading. As Richard Sandor tells us, with good derivatives “You CAN Put a Price on Nature”. Carbon credits emerged as a way to include ‘nature’ in the balance sheet, to insure that it would not be overlooked as a resource. Since these humble beginnings, the carbon market is projected to become the world’s largest commodity market by 2020. To ensure that companies do not resort to ‘carbon leakage’, that is to shift production to countries with less ambitious climate measures, manufacturing industries thought to be at risk of carbon leakage get free emission allocations. Free indulgence masked as emission control. Because industrial sectors are receiving more free pollution permits than the amount of CO2 they emit, which they then sell, they incur windfall profits. In short, speculation and EU regulations have facilitated the transfer of money from taxpayers to industry to the order of billions of EUR.

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Tar Sorbet

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Midsummer Mast

Midsummer Mast was commissioned by CAA as part of Spectres in Change project, funded by Kone Foundation.

Midsummer Mast grew out of a research-led practice focused in forestry and arboriculture, examining their couplings with historical commodity chains (shipbuilding, timber and mast trades, wood derivatives and emission markets among others). Invited by CAA,

FRAUD (Audrey Samson and Françîcco Gayardo) is an artist duo whose work has been exhibited internationally. Their artistic and …

FRAUD

visited the Turku Archipelago and Fiskars in autumn 2019. The encounter with the museum ship Sigyn, which had recently sourced new masts from the Fiskars forests, initiated a collaboration with carpenters and shipwrights to think of ways to salvage the discarded parts.

Context:
The mid-summer pole is a pre-modern summer-solstice related tradition celebrated in many European countries. This custom was also celebrated in certain villages in the west of Finland, including Fiskars, a legacy of the Swedish Empire’s rule.

Birch and pine garlands decorated masts which were erected in offering of good harvests, celebration of the beginning of the ‘light days’ (Celtic calendar), or as popular tribunals where governors, barons and kings were deposed and punished if ruled guilty. These May Poles were hoisted in fields and meadows known as the ‘Ey-commons’ or’ Fields of May’. Thus meadows operated as the highest court in popular law - now known for example in England as ‘commons law’.

The Sigyn, built in 1887, needed new masts in 2018. This wooden barque that crossed the oceans and seas for trade a hundred years ago, the last remaining of its kind, is now a museum ship in Turku. Unlike last century, when Finland provided most European Empires with the timber and tar to build their fleets, when scouting for the mast material in 2018, only a handful of trees in all of Finland were found to be of suitable size. The three trees ultimately used to re-mast Sigyn were found in Fiskars forest.

To foster an exchange between traditional and contemporary practices, the mid-summer mast in Fiskars has been conceptualised and built in collaboration with shipwrights and carpenters. It is made from salvaged discarded masts, spars and other maritime wares from the Sigyn, donated by Forum Marinum.

As the unprecedented environmental crisis creates further emergencies,

FRAUD (Audrey Samson and Françîcco Gayardo) is an artist duo whose work has been exhibited internationally. Their artistic and …

FRAUD

proposes ‘salvaging’ as a way to question the meaning of traditions. Now that there might not be a world to “hand over” to the coming generations, nor is it possible to “return to the sources”, how do we re-claim traditions?

The work was supported by ONOMA, Forum Marinum, Sigyn Foundation, Fiskarin Laatupuu Oy, Ruusupapu, Fiskars Oy, and Fiskars Historical Archives. The work was made possible through a collaboration with Entisöinti Rinne Oy.

Acknowledgements:
A great many individuals have contributed to this project, we extend our gratitude to: Heikki Aska, Taru Elving, Emilia Hänninen, Matleena Kalajoki, Elias Lähdesmäki, Tommi Lavonen, Robert Louhimies, Tapio Maijala, Ville Poikola, Atte Pylvänäinen, Tuomo Rinne, Jukka Salo, Tapio Santala, Kenneth Silver, Saskia Suominen, Rhys Thomas, and Hanna Utriainen.

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Exhibitions

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Istanbul Design Biennale

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HBK Gallery

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AMRO20 Festival

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Somerset House Studios

Carbon Rifts was part of the exhibition 'Complex Value$' at the Somerset House Studios in 2018, which examined the implications of producing, collecting and sorting data for society and the individual. The works in the exhibition took a critical look at the systematic ambiguity, opacity and complexity of mediation processes.
Carbon Rifts is an art-led enquiry which considers the ambiguity and complexity of carbon as a unit of measurement (of nature) and of abstraction. The installation offers a critical gaze onto carbon emissions, mensuration and valuation, through an experimental archaeology of wrecks. It proposes forests and foreshores as salvage sites for carbon incorporating questions such as salvage accumulation, waste management, indentured labour and slavery.
The installation questions the emphasis of the green economy on flow oriented ontologies and network structures whose systemic violence affords a tree to operate as the ultimate siphon between the exhaust of a sweatshop and climate change data banks; or in which designer furniture such as the Paimio chair can become a sleek apparatus for carbon storage, exchange or accumulation.
It contains an interface that randomly loads clips from a large database of Carbon Rifts documentation (the process of unearthing (floating) and gathering wreck wood), a "Slinger" salvaged Montague whaler wreck, a scale, a database video (indefinite length), a video loop 9'00", a wreck wood carbon value (updated in real-time) 600cm x 300cm, asphalt deposit from Pitch Lake (Trinidad) and Sperm Whale oil.

Credits:
The interface is a fork of YoHa's automaton editor.
Live carbon futures pricing was programmed by Alessia Milo, and can be found at carbonderivation.space.

Acknowledgements:
Carbon Rifts would not have been possible without the special support of YoHa (Yokokoji, Harwood) and collaboration from Belton Way Small Craft Club, Leigh Heritage Centre, Southend Borough Council, Alessia Milo, Lani Harwood, Paul Huxler, Brum, Michael Meddle, & Norman Day, among many others. Carbon Rifts was commissioned with the generous support of the London Community Foundation and Cockayne - Grants for the Art, for the Complex Value$ exhibition at the Somerset House Studios.

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Salon Suisse

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Contemporary Art Archipelago

EURO⁠—VISION is an art-led enquiry by

FRAUD (Audrey Samson and Françîcco Gayardo) is an artist duo whose work has been exhibited internationally. Their artistic and …

FRAUD

into the extractive gaze of European institutions and policies, which focuses on the modalities in which resource management shapes and gives corporeality to geopolitics.

The relationship between international relations, trade, economic policy and border security come into focus through the lens of

Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) are resources deemed economically and strategically important for the economy of a sovereign state, and have a high-risk associated with their supply. Criticality is not derived from scarcity, but rather through the covalence between significant economic importance, high-supply risk and the lack of feasible substitutes. In the EU, this has been overseen by the Critical Raw Material Initiative (CRMI) established …

Critical Raw Materials

(CRMs).

In 2008, the 🇪🇺 European Commission 🇪🇺 adopted the

Critical Raw Materials

Initiative, which defined a strategy for accessing resources viewed as imperative to the EU’s subsistence. The criticality of resources is measured according to supply risk and economic importance. Policies are drawn up to ensure the continued availability of materials deemed critical. Such policies have led to agreements guiding the biological and geological exhaustion of the Global South. The current list, revised in 2020, includes 30 materials, including Silica, Cobalt Natural Rubber, Phosphate rock, and the newly added Lithium and Titanium.

How can we understand extraction beyond the removal and displacement of minerals – to encompass policies, international treaties and regulations that impose controversial forms of stewardship of natural resources on communities?

EURO—VISION focuses on the inscriptive operations of initiatives such as the establishment of

Free Trade Zones, Special Economic Zones, Foreign Trade Zones, Export Oriented zones, or just Free Zones are one of the many dirty secrets of modernity.¹ They are enclaves carved out of national territories that are granted exceptional administrative and/or economic freedoms allowing to circumvent labour rights, environmental law and national taxation. Used as a weapon to …

Free Trade Zones

📦 FTZs 📦, fisheries partnerships agreements 📄 FPAs📄, and de-risking investment tools like

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) have been described by developmental economists as budgetary time bombs.¹ Technically, they are long-term contractual arrangements whereby institutional investors and asset managers agree to finance and manage certain public services such as hospitals, highways, energy production plants, housing, or the supply of water and sewage - in …

Public-Private Partnerships

🔖 PPPs 🔖.

FRAUD (Audrey Samson and Françîcco Gayardo) is an artist duo whose work has been exhibited internationally. Their artistic and …

FRAUD

proposes to consider issues through the lens of these materials, as well as to incorporate a wider set of ‘materials’, such as labour and fish(eries). We argue that the latter are managed as resources to be extracted, and that understanding them as critical raw materials as defined by governmental bodies helps to understand how their plunder is mobilised and institutionalised. More importantly, this framework enables us to look beyond these practices to the possibility of thinking and doing otherwise. A number of academics, practitioners, economists, lawyers, activists and journalists have participated in the making of EURO⁠—VISION. Their voices, insights and recommendations are included in various forms. Some of these are interviews, available to download in PDF format, others constitute the body of a series of podcasts. The body of work also includes a number artworks and exhibitions that can be viewed through the meta navigation of this site.

How does this website work?

This site presents a research-led approach to navigation. Intended as a growing resource and archive, the various strands of research that have informed each project build paths of exploration. The structure is based on the dendrogram, the most common diagram used to represent machine learning processes, as well as web platform structures. It is also used by the European Union to visualise resource and material scarcity and flow, such as in the Raw Materials Information System, particularly the Raw Materials Scoreboard.

The dendrogram is based on the visual figure of a decision tree, a structure that suggests hierarchical readability. It exemplifies interpretability. As Adrian MacKenzie notes: "the decision tree, despite its evident visual order, does not say anything about how that order was obtained" (2015, 437). It presents the data in a geometrical space that can be cut into segments. Here however, what can be derived from following the decision tree's path, is a set of references and resources that open up a discussion, rather than providing an answer. The path is non-linear, and presents an interpretation, rather than an absolute.

EURion

The pointer is based on the EURion pattern, which is normally used to prevent counterfeiting. Most copiers are equipped with detection software to block the reproduction of a document which contains it. EURion appears on banknotes such as the EURO, the Moroccan Dirham and the British Pound, and its development and functioning are shrouded in secrecy. The pattern and detection algorithm was allegedly patented by Omron Corporation in 1995. The constellation also resembles the Berlaymont’s building plan in Brussels which houses the headquarters of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union. The term, coined by security researcher Markus Kuhn, is a portmanteau of EUR and the Orion constellation.

CONTACT

FRAUD (Audrey Samson and Françîcco Gayardo) is an artist duo whose work has been exhibited internationally. Their artistic and …

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Audrey Samson & Francisco Gallardo
| else [at] fraud [dot] la | i: @la_fraud |

Acknowledgements

Midsummer Mast and Fields of May are commissioned by Contemporary Art Archipelago as part of Spectres in Change project, funded by Kone Foundation.

Partnerships was produced as part of the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial — Empathy Revisited: Designs for more than one, organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, and curated by: Mariana Pestana, Sumitra Upham and Billie Muraben.

Jable Pardo - Viele Grüße aus Canaria has received the generous support of the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig (HBK) BS Projects programme and from the Canada Art Council.

Euro-vision, or the Making of the Automated Gaze was a collaboration between King's College London's Department of Digital Humanities and artist duo

FRAUD (Audrey Samson and Françîcco Gayardo) is an artist duo whose work has been exhibited internationally. Their artistic and …

FRAUD

, brokered and supported by the Cultural Institute at King’s in partnership with Somerset House Studios.

The EURO—VISION public programme was commissioned by:

RADAR, Loughborough University's commissioning and research programme, as part of their 'Risk Related' programme of commissions.

Arts Catalyst, a nonprofit contemporary arts organisation that commissions and produces transdisciplinary art and research. EURO—VISION is part of their Extractable Matters programme.

EURO—VISION is supported by:

Arts Council England

Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) through the Programme for the Internationalisation of Spanish Culture (PICE), in the framework of the Mobility grants.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

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Data Privacy

March 2021

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