16 June 2025 - 18 June 2025
9:30AM - 5:00PM
Hotel Indigo, 9 Old Elvet, Durham, DH1 3HL
Fully funded (no cost to delegates)
Join our cross-disciplinary, inter-faculty symposium addressing the multi-faceted dimensions of extraction through visual media, storytelling traditions, creative and interpretive practices! The symposium and discussion includes a Keynote address with David Campbell, and a Keynote plus workshop/masterclass with Laura Sillars. Hosted by the Durham Centre for Visual Arts and Culture (CVAC).
Symposium Dates: 16th-18 JuneLocation: Hotel Indigo, 9 New Elvet, Durham, DH1 3HL
Keynote Speakers:
Dr David Campbell, Director of Education, VII Foundation
Dr Laura Sillars, Director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA)
Processes and concepts of extraction have long been central to both material and metaphorical frameworks within visual culture. From the geological to the epistemological, extraction shapes our engagement with tools, narratives, and histories.
Join interdisciplinary researchers, artists and practitioners for this 3-day event, addressing extraction and visuality. This symposium seeks to examine the multifaceted dimensions of extraction as it manifests across visual mediums, storytelling traditions and interpretive practices. Colleagues interested in exploring new interdisciplinary or collaborative approaches are particularly encouraged to attend.
Full programme below.
Monday 16 June
9.00-9.30
Registration and welcome
9.30-12.30
Keynote
Laura Sillars: Mineral Technologies: Tracing the aesthetics of extraction from arts history to the digital screen.
Laura Sillars
9:30 – 10:00 Freestyle Crystallography Workshop
A tactile, open-ended creative session inspired by crystalline forms and mineral structures. This hands-on exercise grounds participants in the materiality of the subject and sets the tone for collaborative and imaginative inquiry.
10:00 – 10:50 The Mineral Image: Artists as Excavators of the Digital A keynote-lecture exploring how contemporary artists engage with the hidden mineral infrastructures of digital technology. Through case studies, visual analysis, and critical reflection, we will examine how artistic practices make extractive systems visible—and thinkable.
10:50 – 11:00 Break
11:00 – 11:30 Excavating Your Mineral Archive
You will be invited to trace your own relationship with mineral technologies through guided writing and visual prompts. What materials power the tools you use daily? What histories lie beneath the surfaces of your devices, studios, or practices? This session will invite critical reflection as a foundation for the manifesto work to follow.
11:30 – 12:30 A Provisional Mineral Manifesto
In small groups, participants will engage with selected texts from The Crystal World Reader and a wider set of references we will explore alternative approaches to matter, technology, and ethics. Drawing on provocations by artists and policy makers, each group will develop a set of statements for inclusion in a speculative “mineral manifesto.” These may take the form of declarations, poetic fragments, material ethics, or speculative redesigns of extractive systems.
12.30-13.15
Lunch
13.15-14.45
Panel
Photography
Rio Creech
Rubber and Rifles: the role of photography in the fight to dominate the natural rubber industry in late colonial Malaya
Rosalind Hayes
Extracting Animals: Creaturely Materiality and Early Photography
Sophie Piper
Towards an Inclusive Re/visualisation of Women’s Work
14.45-15.15
Break
15.15-16.15
Film screening
Penelope Anthias
Urukurenda: In Search of the Land Without Evil (Ĩvĩ Maraëï)
16.30 – 18.00
Sabina Sallis
How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Planet: A Non-Extractive Approach to Art and Knowledge. Pedagogy Against Extraction: Earthbound Learning as Radical Visuality. (Art walk)
Tuesday 17 June
Tea/coffee
9.30-11.15
Questions of method
Sahar Sagha
Instagram as a Digital Mine During the Protest
Peter Whitton
Extracting academic identity: doors and desks, the social production of personal university spaces
Megan Kuster and Sarah Comyn
The ‘EXTRACTS’ project: Fostering collectives of creative-critical practice
11.15-11.30
11.30-13.00
Temporalities of Extraction: Narratives of Social and Environmental Violence and Transformation
Jenny Terry
Sedimenting Black Geologies in Fiction and Art
Adam Bridgen
Imagining Slow Violence during the Industrial Revolution: Metaphors of Extraction in Labouring-Class Poetry
Rebecca Macklin
Visualising Relations in the Tar Sands: Extraction, Aesthetics, and Repair
13.00-13.45
13.45-15.15
Plans, maps, and information
Mike Crang
‘Through the hush’d Chorasmian waste… shorn and parcell’d Oxus strains along’: from visions of engineering to depictions of disaster, from imaginaries of abundance to emptiness in the demise of the Aral Sea.
Renwen Xu
Extracting Meaning in Multimodal Museum Spaces: A Cognitive Perspective on Visitor Experience
Oliver Betts
From Mine to Station to Sea – Extractive Stories in the collections of the National Railway Museum and Locomotion.
15.15-15.45
15.30-17.00
Games and exploration
TBC
Ladan Cockshut
Did you Factorio that in when you extracted No Man's Sky?: Minecrafting the visualities of extraction in videogames.
Inês Barreiros
The 16th hole of Vale do Lobo Golf Resort: plantanoceno, visuality, and ancestral future
17.00-18.30
Stuart Jones
Geology walk around Durham
18.30
Optional pub + dinner
Wednesday 18 June
9.30-12.00
David Campbell
‘Losing the Play’: How Competitive Photojournalism Led to the Wrongful Attribution of an Iconic War Photograph
12.00-13.00
13.00-15.00
Round-up and next steps
Open discussion
15.00
Close
We look forward to you joining us!
Contact Information:
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