The Extractive Turn. An Art History of Consumption
The increasing prominence of ecological questions in contemporary art has given rise to artistic practices that critically address climate change, environmental degradation, and the extraction of planetary resources. Within art-historical scholarship, these practices have frequently been discussed in terms of environmental awareness, political activism, and as aesthetic responses to ecological crisis. Yet the material and infrastructural conditions underlying such artistic interventions have received comparatively little attention. This research project addresses this gap by developing the concept of the "extractive turn": a critical and materialist approach to the ecological turn in art history that examines how ecological materials, knowledge, experiences, and crises are appropriated and transformed into artistic, symbolic, and economic value under fossil capitalism. At the same time, the notion of an "extractive turn" critically addresses the growing diversity of discourses subsumed under the term extractivism, examining the heterogeneous material, economic, political, and epistemic processes it has come to encompass, as well as the conceptual implications of its expanding use across artistic fields of inquiry.
At the centre of the project lies a fundamental contradiction of contemporary ecological aesthetics: artistic practices advocating environmental consciousness frequently depend upon the very extractive infrastructures, industrial processes, and global supply chains they seek to criticize. This becomes particularly evident in technology-based and immersive art, whose production, exhibition, and circulation rely on energy-intensive computation, critical raw materials, semiconductor industries, and digital infrastructures. Works by artists such as Julian Charrière, Olafur Eliasson, Cyprien Gaillard, John Gerrard, Pierre Huyghe, and Tomás Saraceno provide exemplary cases for investigating these contradictions. By examining their material conditions alongside their aesthetic strategies, curatorial presentation, and institutional reception, the project critically reassesses the relationship between ecological discourse and artistic autonomy, including the growing significance of environmental consciousness as a form of cultural and economic capital.
These contemporary developments are situated within a longer history of artistic consumption. From marble quarrying and mineral pigment extraction to industrial chemistry, analogue photography, and computational image production, artistic practices have historically depended on the transformation and expenditure of natural resources. The project traces how industrialization and the expansion of technological infrastructures intensified these dependencies, culminating in the resource-intensive conditions of contemporary digital culture. Particular attention is directed toward the relationship between digitality and ecological exhaustion, as artificial intelligence, immersive environments, cloud-based storage, and automated image production establish new material and energetic demands.
A further focus concerns artistic practices that engage directly with the political, organizational, and material structures of ecological transformation. Drawing on historical examples of environmental art and contemporary forms of collective organization, the project examines strategies that intervene in institutional infrastructures, social relations, and systems of production and circulation. Alongside such organizational approaches, practices of collecting, archiving, cultivation, sowing, and harvesting are investigated as potential counter-extractivist models of artistic engagement with physical nature. These perspectives allow ecological aesthetics to be reconsidered in relation to alternative modes of material reproduction.
Methodologically, the project combines close analysis of artworks and exhibitions with historical source research, media archaeology, institutional critique, and investigations into technological and economic infrastructures. It further challenges moralizing interpretations of ecological art that displace systemic contradictions onto individual artistic responsibility and ethical imperatives of renunciation. Instead, artistic production becomes a site for investigating the structural conditions through which ecological crises are reproduced, represented, and economically mediated.
Ultimately, "The Extractive Turn" proposes an art history of consumption that understands artworks through the resources, energy, labour, and infrastructures required for their production, circulation, exhibition, and preservation. By integrating the material conditions of ecological reflection into art-historical analysis, the project seeks to establish a critical framework for understanding the infrastructures of art production in relation to ecology within a fossil-capitalist modernity.