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Visit the virtual Gold Matters exhibition

The virtual Exhibition Gold Matters is now live and can be explored online. This exhibition is the result of collaborations between artists, members of mining communities, and researchers of the Gold Matters’ project. Curating the exhibition is a collaborative effort of the Gold Matters Team with Sabine Luning acting as principal curator. The exhibition shows photos, video’s and artworks from three different regions: the Amazon, Uganda and West Africa. The Exhibition takes the audience on a journey moving from ‘Exhibition of the Exhibition in Kejetia’ to visual results from fieldwork research.

The exhibition

The exhibition exists of six ‘rooms’ with a different theme: Exhibition of the Exhibition, Arts of Co-labouring, ARTistic and ARTisanal, In-depth Terrains, Gold Lifeways and Moving Matters. The visitor can scroll through the rooms and enjoy the various pictures that tell different stories of the miners, the researchers and the artists. The exhibition includes work by the photographer Nii Obodai and images by the painter Christophe Sawadogo. All the other visual materials result from research collaborations, often involving members of mining communities. 

Printscreen of some of the works of the virtual exhibition

16 million people depending on Gold Mining

The project explores whether a transformative approach towards sustainability can arise in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining (ASGM). Around 16 million people are dependent on ASGM as a livelihood. Gold Mining is economically very important for the people involved, but it’s also associated with negative impacts on environmental, social and health levels. To address sustainability-linked transformation it is very important to understand how actors engage with nature, politics and economics. The project ‘Exploring Transformations to Sustainability in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining’ aims to gather information and evidence on this topic. 

The Gold Matter’s project

The Gold Matters project, with CADS researchers Sabine Luning and Esther van de Camp, is ‘Exploring Transformations to Sustainability in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining’. One of the goals is to include research with miners to understand how they see the future and sustainability in gold mining. Researchers and artists from different institutes and disciplines are conducting empirical research in Brazil, Suriname, French Guiana, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Guinea Conakry and Uganda. Together they seek to co-labour understandings of the futures inspired by gold. The intention is to learn about how mining actors envisage their futures, with artists guiding representations of these futures for others.

Watch the recorded webinar of the launch of the exhibition

To mark the launch of the Gold Matter’s virtual exhibition, the Nordic Africa Institute will hosted a webinar. 

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