Sam Doctor- Complicit Country

Complicit Country, 2020, (Drone mapping output as single channel 4K HD Digital video, colour, sound Duration 6:30 on loop,) A temporal video artwork representing the act of colonisation extractivism. Described by theorist Albert Acosta, extractivism is and appropriation” that is part of a capitalist relation artwork becomes a generous conduit for processes of reconciliation and restorative justice. Rather than diminishing art as a mere tool for other ends, it is the strength of practice and process in certain art which overflows disciplinary borders and in the generosity of the evidentiary image extends meaning further. Complicit Country records imagery by drone cameras and gives the viewer a bird eyes view of a landscape, being the remains of a once active uranium mine that now is desolate and disintegrated. Since it’s abandonment the mine has become a site of slow violence being inflicted on its inhabitants the traditional custodians of the land, the Kalkadoon people and diminishing biodiversity. As mining companies have extracted most resources from our vulnerable terrains more corporations are researching ways to begin trawling for nickel, manganese and cobalt and could cause irreversible and extensive damage to the sea bed and oceans of the planet. Mining on earth is a lesson to be learnt for future mining of the ocean. Oceanographers, biologists and other researchers have warned that deep sea mining plans would cause widespread pollution, destroy global fish stocks and obliterate marine ecosystems. As we know the ocean plays a critical role in the basic functioning of our planet, and protecting its delicate ecosystem is not just critical for marine biodiversity but for all life on Earth. It has become increasingly clear in the last couple of years that, apart from other dangers, deep-sea mining poses a particular threat to the climate,” said Catherine Weller, Fauna & Flora’s director of global policy. “The deep sea holds vast reservoirs of carbon which could be completely disrupted by mining on the scale being proposed and exacerbate the global crisis we are experiencing through rising greenhouse gas levels.” Our Oceans are already stressed, plastic-ridden, overheated. Delicate, long-living denizens of the deep – polychaete worms, sea cucumbers, corals and squid – would be obliterated by dredging the sea bed. At the same time, plumes of sediments, laced with toxic metals, would be sent spiralling upwards to poison marine food-chains. “It is hard to imagine how seabed mines could feasibly operate without devastating species and ecosystems,” says UK marine biologist Helen Scales – a view shared by David Attenborough, who has called for a moratorium on all deep-sea mining plans. “Mining means destruction and in this case, it means the destruction of an ecosystem about which we know pathetically little,” he says. Deep sea mining will be mostly established within our waters and our pacific ocean islander neighbours including Nauru, Tonga, Kiribati, Cook Islands. Just as Complicit Country’s location being a mine in Mt Isa, that was an act of colonisation on indigenous land by unforgiving corporations of greed, the future of the ocean and deep-sea mining will again be another act of colonisation extractivism