Teresa Dillon, Max Dovey, Yadira Sanchez Benitez & Stephen Cornford, in conversation with Jussi Parikka.
Monday 18 May 2026, 14:00 - 19:30, Rotunda & Lecture Theatre B, Winchester School of Art
Background
Critical Minerals are the raw materials of digital technologies and electrified infrastructures. They are now considered vital resources to sustain national economies and maintain national security, but global supply chains are geopolitically monopolised and enmeshed in both regional conflicts and unethical labour practices. With our contemporary societies so entwined with these minerals and elements, we are bringing together a group of people whose creative practices engage with or offer directions through which to explore such entanglements.
Agenda
The day will bring together a group of artists, curators and researchers with shared concerns and practices, to collectively discuss the spectrum of artistic approaches and questions they raise, with a view to initiating ongoing discussions, developing future collaborations, and just making time for sharing ideas.
Due to the nature of the practices being shared, the afternoon sessions are in person only. The evening conversation with Jussi Parikka is taking place online. Registration link: https://luma.com/pwjo48ol
Timetable
13:00 - 14:00 Arrival and lunch
14:00 - 16:30 Sharing of Critical Mineral Practices by research group members.
16.30 - 17.00 Break
17.00 - 18.00 Open Discussion session
18:00 - 18:30 Break / opportunity to view Whispers Exhibition, Social Practice Lab
18.30 - 19.30 Conversation with Jussi Parikka (online)
19:30 - 21:30 Dinner
14.00-16.30: Sharing of practices
Teresa Dillon:Teresa will open with a guided visualisation mediation and writing exercise that speaks to awareness to the critical minerals that reside in everyday mobile and network technologies.
Max Dovey:Max has been developing a series of 'Rare Earth Walks' as embodied modes for thinking with critical minerals and non-human subjectivities. He will lead a short participatory exercise, exploring the lifecycles of critical minerals and how roleplay could be used to consider the governance of life as it extends into geological terrains. Max is currently preparing this work for family audiences at music festivals this summer.
Stephen Cornford:Stephen will present a short piece for radio compiled from his fieldwork with earth scientists over the last 5 years. In it we hear the technologies of prospecting, the laboratories of earth science, the infrastructures of renewable energy, and the field equipment of geophysics. Our guide during this geotechnical audio tour is Anthony McNulty, the chairperson of Protect Moylisha. Anthony is leading the campaign to prevent the establishment of a lithium mine in County Wicklow, Ireland.
Yadira Sanchez Benitez:Yadira will share an open hardware work consisting of a set of mobile radios powered by small solar panels. We will collectively walk them around the campus as an act of imagination, asking what it might mean for residents to hold a neighbourhood network in their hands, to carry it, place it, move it again. The work asks us to think together about how infrastructure might belong to the people who live alongside it, and what happens when electronics, and the rare earths inside them, are held by hands, by neighbours, by a street that decides where signal should go.
17.00-18.00: Open Discussion
This open discussion session will address two main questions:
Firstly, artistic practices that address specific agendas are often framed as “raising awareness”. We are now in a time when awareness of the Critical Minerals agenda is relatively high—with, for example, series on BBC Radio 4, an exhibition opening later this year at Oxford Natural History Museum, and books such as Nicolas Niarchos ‘The Elements of Power’ (2026) and Ernest Scheyder ‘The War Below’ (2024) addressing supply chains conflicts, key actors and so-called artisanal mining. Several of us have been working in this area for a decade now, without the questions raised by our practices becoming any less relevant, so we are interested in discussing: what comes after this paradigm of raising awareness?
Secondly, we would like to discuss how our individual and collective work around Critical Minerals and Rare Earth Elements informs and inflects our various practices as educators, curators and organisers?
18.30-19.30: Evening conversation with Jussi Parikka (online)
Winchester’s identity as a centre for research around media materiality begins from the work of Professor Jussi Parikka, much of whose work on media archaeology, in particular his book Geology of Media (2015), was written here. Over ten years later, the legacy of this work has been to create a unique concentration of media geological research and practice in the department of Art and Media Technology. In this conversation we will discuss the relationship between Jussi’s work on media materiality and artistic practice, and the legacy of this important book, including his current focus on environmental media.
