World of Matter

When matter is not reduced to its commodity function, different capacities of energy present on our planet come into sight. The relationship of human beings to the earth is increasingly experienced as being in a state of crisis. In many places, the neoliberal economy’s incessant hunger for resource exploitation has led to trails of destruction and violent confrontation. More and more, the growing magnitude of these operations is giving rise to resistant formations that are not only oriented toward the prevention of specific extraction projects, but are calling for a fundamental overhaul of our perception of the earth as a passive deposit of supplies. The collaborative art project World of Matter responds to this call for a more ecological world-view through a collection of visual material on resource matters, arguing that any discursive shift necessitates and depends upon a different perspective on human–earth relations—a new mode of thinking is bound up in engaging a new imaginary of the world.