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TANYA BUSSE (*1982) and EMILIJA ŠKARNULYTĖ (*1987)
live and work in Tromsø. Together they make up New Mineral Collective (NMC) is the largest and least
productive mining company in the world, a platform that looks at contemporary landscape politics to better
understand the nature and extent of human interaction with the Earth’s surface.
As an organism, they infiltrate the extractive industry with alternative forces
such as human desires, body mining, and acts of counter prospecting.
The skyline of Las Vegas emerges over the ochre tones of the Nevada desert. It punctures the clouds with its crowning lances over the protruding upright steel and glass spires. It is a city known for its Stratosphere Tower, hotel skyscrapers, and an ode to architectural simulacra—a city that Baudrillard would describe as the epitome of postmodern simulation. Gambling, eroticism for sale, and overconsumption characterise the overtly aggressive, reckless, and penetrative reality of the city. It sits enclosed in the organic valleys of crumbling dry hills caressed by winds over millennia, creating a stark visual contrast. The soft matte curves contrast against the sparkling geometries of glass citadels. Anything that goes up, must also go down—and not far away from the exuberant city of chromatic slot-machines and spinning roulette wheels are the prospected lands where minerals are extracted when found in sufficient quantities. The conical forms that emerge from the earth are a mirror-image of the decadent steel buildings; plunging beneath the surface of the earth, they excavate in a different game of gambling. Stock market numbers vacillate rapidly, shooting from one mineral to the next—an elaborate game of luck and strategy behind the opaque glass office buildings of city-centre corporate hedge funds.
Neon Oasis (2017) is a project that visualises the contrasting landscapes of the urban centre, axes of power, and the land that provides its resources for expansion. Penetrative techniques of our petro-capitalist society are opposed by their organic counterpart of desire and pleasure based on tactility and care. In the film, the female body enters the landscape to visualise this opposition. Spa-practices and therapies for rejuvenation are proposed as a model for an earth-scale revival through geo-therapy and counter-prospecting. The pictorial representation of bodies in landscapes open up new connections between individuals and our surroundings. The practice of counter-prospecting is central to New Mineral Collective’s aims. Norwegian architect Kjerstin Uhre defines it as “an experimental and interpretive praxis-based method that operates on two intersecting planes: It resists dominant and already given prospects, while on a plane of anticipation it reaches beyond these in a prospective exchange towards possible alternative futures”. Neon Oasis is part of a larger whole, a project whose methodology opens up in various chapters. The practice as a whole ranges across radical geographies distributed around the earth and operates through dialogue, discussion, and actions, to reach new radical conclusions on human debt owed to a planet in desperate need of reparations.
New Mineral Collective is a platform that was established in 2013 by Tromsøbased artists Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė. They are also perhaps the largest and least productive mining company in the world—a phrase that narratively unfolds through their videos and installations. In Northern Norway, where the pair met, they initially worked on highly contested exploitable lands that are becoming accessible to extractive pursuits in the age of taiga-thawing global warming. Their films have spanned different areas of the globe, from the super-saline shores of the Dead Sea to the North American suburban sprawllands, and culminated in the large-scale film installation Pleasure Prospects premiered at the inaugural Toronto Biennial in 2019. Toronto and its expansive northward-facing province of Ontario served as the seat from which to examine the contradictions in the glass-mirrored vertical spires of the stock exchange—a global symbol of financial and political power—algorithmically trading in values that tangibly produce the permanent scarring and disembowelling of the Canadian Arctic. The duo stitches geographies together whose connection is usually abstracted, but whose realities are deeply intertwined. The lands that surround Toronto are lax in regulations for prospecting, so much so that Busse and Škarnulytė were able to buy their own rights to prospect terrain and use their experimental collective methods.
Gestures and contradictions in various landscapes are repeated throughout New Mineral Collective’s filmography, drawing us ever closer to a practiced and applicable methodology. Discernible across the films is the synchronicity of the female body with the earth’s geological strata—a prescriptive cure to the scarring left by the penetrative drilling and open excavation methods that often disrupt or destroy the space and ecosystems. A metaphor between the surface of the earth and human skin arises in the visual simultaneity of invasive mining equipment boring into the surface of the earth and the delicate needles of an acupuncture session in Pressure Point Acupuncture (2019). Spa aesthetics permeate the films and bring about the coexistence of minerals and the human body. Spa programmes promise relaxation and rejuvenation through chemical absorption of Dead Sea minerals through the skin. In the film Your Body Is a Mine (2019) Busse and Škarnulytė perform in front of two bulldozers who remove the accumulated layers of salt from the Dead Sea floor. They short-circuit production cycles by entering the zones of origin of mined material destined for bodily consumption via bottled commodities. The film reveals an industry-stricken coast close to disappearance. Bathers float on the dense waters of the Dead Sea, an area long known for its therapeutic properties, they cover their skin in clay minerals and wash it away ritualistically—without the acceleration of machines, this constitutes slow-mining.
New Mineral Collective
(Tanya Busse & Emilija Škarnulytė), Proposal III: Neon Oasis Location 36°10’30’’N 115°08’11’’W
Geotherapy: Hydrotherapy, 2019, HD video installation, 11:43 min, film still. Courtesy: Tanya Busse
Constantly interacting with its surroundings, absorbing, and releasing minerals, the body as mine always goes both ways. In and out. The human body is a pillar of both pleasure and desire. Back in Nevada in Neon Oasis, the female body contrasts with the aggressive virility of a male-dominated sexuality, that approaches the earth as loot to plunder and a means to assert power. A progressive intersectional approach recognises planetary sentience, a living and breathing biosphere that constructs a complex terran mega-organism. In the film vast landscapes pan across the screen: a lake dappled with algae feeds onto an endless salt flat. Dry mountains reach towards the blue sky housing sparse and prickly vegetation endemic to the American Southwest. The mountains, like the pronounced wrinkles on a furrowed brow lead to the slow river valleys marking paths of water dripping for centuries across the ochre surface of the land. The impressive crevasses bear witness to flood events hundreds of thousands of years in the making, like a sealed scar on the body that speaks of past geo-traumas that have formed the hard individual we know today.
New Mineral Collective diagnoses the landscape. Punctuated with urban sprawl the recommended course of action for the Las Vegas valley is hydro-therapy. The technique has been used medicinally for centuries and typically consists of baths in mineral-infused waters that relax the body, improve circulation, and can produce a plethora of positive effects. For earth it means returning the minerals from whence they came, irrigating the earth to produce bounteous fertility, and erasing the holes left in a scarred environment. These methods are appropriated from spas and retreats where minerals dug from the ground provide a restful atmosphere. Geometric architecture encapsulates the body in crystallised patterns of pools and tiles.
Counter-prospecting is about bringing the spa home. The relaxation methods and techniques become decontextualized from the capitalist apparatus of mathematical economic power, and turned towards the outside. In the final scene of Neon Oasis, Busse and Škarnulytė float in a manicured swimming pool—the hydrotherapy available to the body is prescribed to the wounded earth, a cleansing ritual that brings new life, softens the soil, and might reduce the visibility of scars. Counter-prospecting is not about falling into the tropes of nature absent of human presence; it is about recognising our biological entanglement and mutual survival with our environment, to enter a new era of radical dialogue and mutual care.
New Mineral Collective — Neon Oasis
by Ángels MiraldaThe skyline of Las Vegas emerges over the ochre tones of the Nevada desert. It punctures the clouds with its crowning lances over the protruding upright steel and glass spires. It is a city known for its Stratosphere Tower, hotel skyscrapers, and an ode to architectural simulacra—a city that Baudrillard would describe as the epitome of postmodern simulation. Gambling, eroticism for sale, and overconsumption characterise the overtly aggressive, reckless, and penetrative reality of the city. It sits enclosed in the organic valleys of crumbling dry hills caressed by winds over millennia, creating a stark visual contrast. The soft matte curves contrast against the sparkling geometries of glass citadels. Anything that goes up, must also go down—and not far away from the exuberant city of chromatic slot-machines and spinning roulette wheels are the prospected lands where minerals are extracted when found in sufficient quantities. The conical forms that emerge from the earth are a mirror-image of the decadent steel buildings; plunging beneath the surface of the earth, they excavate in a different game of gambling. Stock market numbers vacillate rapidly, shooting from one mineral to the next—an elaborate game of luck and strategy behind the opaque glass office buildings of city-centre corporate hedge funds.
Neon Oasis (2017) is a project that visualises the contrasting landscapes of the urban centre, axes of power, and the land that provides its resources for expansion. Penetrative techniques of our petro-capitalist society are opposed by their organic counterpart of desire and pleasure based on tactility and care. In the film, the female body enters the landscape to visualise this opposition. Spa-practices and therapies for rejuvenation are proposed as a model for an earth-scale revival through geo-therapy and counter-prospecting. The pictorial representation of bodies in landscapes open up new connections between individuals and our surroundings. The practice of counter-prospecting is central to New Mineral Collective’s aims. Norwegian architect Kjerstin Uhre defines it as “an experimental and interpretive praxis-based method that operates on two intersecting planes: It resists dominant and already given prospects, while on a plane of anticipation it reaches beyond these in a prospective exchange towards possible alternative futures”. Neon Oasis is part of a larger whole, a project whose methodology opens up in various chapters. The practice as a whole ranges across radical geographies distributed around the earth and operates through dialogue, discussion, and actions, to reach new radical conclusions on human debt owed to a planet in desperate need of reparations.
New Mineral Collective is a platform that was established in 2013 by Tromsøbased artists Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė. They are also perhaps the largest and least productive mining company in the world—a phrase that narratively unfolds through their videos and installations. In Northern Norway, where the pair met, they initially worked on highly contested exploitable lands that are becoming accessible to extractive pursuits in the age of taiga-thawing global warming. Their films have spanned different areas of the globe, from the super-saline shores of the Dead Sea to the North American suburban sprawllands, and culminated in the large-scale film installation Pleasure Prospects premiered at the inaugural Toronto Biennial in 2019. Toronto and its expansive northward-facing province of Ontario served as the seat from which to examine the contradictions in the glass-mirrored vertical spires of the stock exchange—a global symbol of financial and political power—algorithmically trading in values that tangibly produce the permanent scarring and disembowelling of the Canadian Arctic. The duo stitches geographies together whose connection is usually abstracted, but whose realities are deeply intertwined. The lands that surround Toronto are lax in regulations for prospecting, so much so that Busse and Škarnulytė were able to buy their own rights to prospect terrain and use their experimental collective methods.
Gestures and contradictions in various landscapes are repeated throughout New Mineral Collective’s filmography, drawing us ever closer to a practiced and applicable methodology. Discernible across the films is the synchronicity of the female body with the earth’s geological strata—a prescriptive cure to the scarring left by the penetrative drilling and open excavation methods that often disrupt or destroy the space and ecosystems. A metaphor between the surface of the earth and human skin arises in the visual simultaneity of invasive mining equipment boring into the surface of the earth and the delicate needles of an acupuncture session in Pressure Point Acupuncture (2019). Spa aesthetics permeate the films and bring about the coexistence of minerals and the human body. Spa programmes promise relaxation and rejuvenation through chemical absorption of Dead Sea minerals through the skin. In the film Your Body Is a Mine (2019) Busse and Škarnulytė perform in front of two bulldozers who remove the accumulated layers of salt from the Dead Sea floor. They short-circuit production cycles by entering the zones of origin of mined material destined for bodily consumption via bottled commodities. The film reveals an industry-stricken coast close to disappearance. Bathers float on the dense waters of the Dead Sea, an area long known for its therapeutic properties, they cover their skin in clay minerals and wash it away ritualistically—without the acceleration of machines, this constitutes slow-mining.

Constantly interacting with its surroundings, absorbing, and releasing minerals, the body as mine always goes both ways. In and out. The human body is a pillar of both pleasure and desire. Back in Nevada in Neon Oasis, the female body contrasts with the aggressive virility of a male-dominated sexuality, that approaches the earth as loot to plunder and a means to assert power. A progressive intersectional approach recognises planetary sentience, a living and breathing biosphere that constructs a complex terran mega-organism. In the film vast landscapes pan across the screen: a lake dappled with algae feeds onto an endless salt flat. Dry mountains reach towards the blue sky housing sparse and prickly vegetation endemic to the American Southwest. The mountains, like the pronounced wrinkles on a furrowed brow lead to the slow river valleys marking paths of water dripping for centuries across the ochre surface of the land. The impressive crevasses bear witness to flood events hundreds of thousands of years in the making, like a sealed scar on the body that speaks of past geo-traumas that have formed the hard individual we know today.
New Mineral Collective diagnoses the landscape. Punctuated with urban sprawl the recommended course of action for the Las Vegas valley is hydro-therapy. The technique has been used medicinally for centuries and typically consists of baths in mineral-infused waters that relax the body, improve circulation, and can produce a plethora of positive effects. For earth it means returning the minerals from whence they came, irrigating the earth to produce bounteous fertility, and erasing the holes left in a scarred environment. These methods are appropriated from spas and retreats where minerals dug from the ground provide a restful atmosphere. Geometric architecture encapsulates the body in crystallised patterns of pools and tiles.
Counter-prospecting is about bringing the spa home. The relaxation methods and techniques become decontextualized from the capitalist apparatus of mathematical economic power, and turned towards the outside. In the final scene of Neon Oasis, Busse and Škarnulytė float in a manicured swimming pool—the hydrotherapy available to the body is prescribed to the wounded earth, a cleansing ritual that brings new life, softens the soil, and might reduce the visibility of scars. Counter-prospecting is not about falling into the tropes of nature absent of human presence; it is about recognising our biological entanglement and mutual survival with our environment, to enter a new era of radical dialogue and mutual care.
