Mines and art, miners as artists, or: Do miners go to gallery shows?

First things first: What is Coast Contemporary? Started by artist Tanja Sæter in 2015, it is an annual event that introduces international curators and institutions to the Norwegian artist scene. A part of the concept is to bring the people together in a space that invites, or forces, connections. Indeed, the success rate from the past nine editions, always set in new locations, has been significant, with several Norwegian artists seeing new trajectories abroad thanks to participating in the event.

Sæter, who earnestly calls Coast Contemporary her practice as an artist – and jokingly refers to it as “an unemployment office, a travel company” – also makes sure a part of the program intersects with the public, although most of the events are aimed at art professionals. This year, as Coast Contemporary ascended on Rogaland for the first time, the event bounced between presentations of various artistic, curatorial and academic practices in a congregation house in Sogndalsstrand and exhibitions and live events at Velferden, Sokndal’s arena for contemporary art led by artists Maiken Stene and Hans Edward Hammonds. The event concluded with the group travelling to Stavanger to attend Open Studios Stavanger.

Ushering visitors from one place to another in a bright yellow vintage bus complete with a jolly, uniformed driver, Coast Contemporary also included a stop at the Titania mine. As we stood at a viewing platform offering panoramic, dizzying views of the gaping pit, I told one participant that I was confused about how I was supposed to feel, staring into the earth’s depths, exposed as if in mid-surgery. As a Stavanger-born person, I know this feeling already. Worries about global warming and seemingly unstoppable petro-futures combined with a sense of pride in technical engineering in the North Sea, patriotic heart thumps for the sacrifices of offshore workers, a naïve eagerness in sharing how oil wealth is sustainably (sic) managed. I diverge.

The tour guide, an employee of the mining company, closed the tour by relaying this twistedly poetic phrase: “You know, we miners are also making art. Big art, big patterns in the earth’s surface. And it will be there until the next glacier takes care of it.” Mic drop? I wonder at the miner reflecting on his own ability to make art, but also that artists, in turn, could be seen as extractivists, always thirsty for inspiration, greedily utilizing the world around them to produce outcome. And that most certainly, the visit to this mine on that cloudy Tuesday afternoon, for many will be such a conceptual and artistic caramel to suck on, as Velferden’s already long running project on mining waste has proved.

My thoughts land on the exhibition There’s no such thing as solid ground by Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga, in which her negative monuments inspired by mining claimed space in the white-walled rooms of Berlin’s Gropius Bau. And indeed, the glimmering white walls of the white cube are eerily present as we look out on the deep wound in the earth through foggy bus windows. The Titania mine produces ilmenite and titanium dioxide, which is used to produce the colour white, and was among the first locations in the world to do so. As in: The white in the white cube literally started here. My Chilean partner and co-parent Carlos, who accompanied the trip in capacity as photographer, relays the rumour of how the architecture of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, although attributed to organic architectural style inspired by nature, is thought to be inspired by the gigantic Chuquicamata mine in northern Chile, where the Guggenheim family made their parts of their wealth.

I ask myself if whiteness as a concept of racial “purity” also played a role in the promoting of ilmenite, which is later confirmed as I see in Marte Jonslien’s project Descend and Dwell for the first time. Presented at Velferden during Coast Contemporary, it shows among other things an archival advert for Titania, where, incorporated in a ceramic piece, we see a boy asking “Mother, am I the whitest in the world?”. My thoughts twitch and drift to Howardena Pindell’s videowork Free, White and 21 from 1980, where she recounts Pindell’s mother’s nanny attempts at scrubbing her white. I make a quiet wish: Of all the things I hope my own children long for, may whiteness not be it.

Rocks in my childhood mountains painted the world white. Several presentations and artworks shown during Coast Contemporary connect colonial histories from one end of the world to the other, as is its nature: Australian-born, Oslo-based Martin White’s lecture The Souls of White Folk (a personal highlight) weaved a net of complex histories through a brilliant multimedia performance. Charline Kopf, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Oslo, threaded the intricate stories of how ilmenite travels from Senegal to Tyssedal, Norway, and proposed dust as a form of archive, exemplified sand arriving from the Sahara to southern Europe carries traces of nuclear testing that France did in Senegal.

Back in the yellow bus while visiting the Titania mine, we see the ground glowing with intensely green moss amongst the otherwise exposed, arid rock. Over the speakers, we are explained that it’s due to all the nitrate in the explosives used on site. “Radical gardening!”, erupts one of the delegates. A rush of welcome laughter resonated through the bus, and I wonder, do miners go to gallery shows?