Mineral Rights: Lara Almarcegui

Who owns the globe’s sub-surface? What lies there, and how is it instrumentalised by private interests? Extending Witte de With’s year-long cycle Art In the Age Of…, with a focus on Energy and Raw Material, artist Lara Almarcegui presents Mineral Rights; a body of research and series of artworks. Tracing seams of iron ore, pools of oil, and deposits of alloys, Almarcegui pursues mineral rights across several countries, variously recording her attempts and failures.As part of a probing, and often humorous, investigation into the intersection between land rights, ownership, and matter she shares a new stage in her research that explores the mineral rights beneath Rotterdam and Witte de With itself, in conversation with theorists and experts in the field including writer and geologist Salomon Kroonenberg, and lawyer Willem Bosma.