Artist-run project EXTRACTION
"We are no longer in a state of growth;
We are in a state of excess.
We are living in a society of excrescence.”
Jean Baudrillard
PROJECT OVERVIEW
EXTRACTION is a multimedia, multi-venue, cross border art intervention that seeks to provoke societal change by exposing and questioning the negative social and environmental consequences of industrial extraction done to people, particularly the indigenous and disenfranchised communities, to the ravaged landscapes and poisoned water to climate change and its many troubling implications.
Nothing like EXTRACTION has been attempted before: All art forms addressing a single theme — the suicidal consumption of the planet’s natural resources.
Prominent writers, critics, historians, educators, environmentalists, and other experts have been enlisted as advisors to provide related texts and to help us forge affiliations with non-art organizations. The Nevada Museum of Art, a national leader in the exhibition, collection, study, and promotion of environmentally related art has agreed to archive all project documentation. We don’t consider ourselves social workers or political activists. We aspire to the timeless role of aesthetic troublemaker, or trickster, producing artworks as interventions that disturb the collective oblivion that results in this suicidal cultural contract.
A collective global exclamation: “ENOUGH!”
INVITATION OF EMILIE BITAULD BY EDWIN DOBB
Emilie Bitauld was early invited to join the Extraction project by Edwin Dobb. Her works that were curated are aluminium multiples from the Migratory birds series. After years of online exchanges and a previous intent to meet in San Francisco, the eminent Berkeley Journalism instructor unexpectedly passed away, just before the month they had planed to work along with Samuel Pelts. She stays open to help on the European tour of the Extraction project.
CATALOG AND EXHIBITION GUIDEBOOK
The “Megazine” is the CODEX Foundation’s publication for Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss, widely available now. Like the Extraction Project itself, this book is many different things at once. Partly a group catalog of extraction-related artwork, each artist or creator’s individual contribution documents their own personal investigations into the extraction question, addressing a specific issue or set of issues under the broader umbrella of the Extraction Project.
WHAT’S NEXT >
The Extraction Project will culminate in a constellation of nearly fifty overlapping exhibitions, performances, installations, site-specific work, land art, in situ art, publications, poetry readings, and cross-media events throughout 2021 and beyond.
Already taking place in multiple locations throughout the U.S. and abroad, the project is de-centered, non-hierarchical, and self-organizing, which means that artists, art venues, curators, and art supporters participate and collaborate as they see fit, including helping the project expand geographically. Everyone can be both creator and catalyst. We invite everyone to join us in creating an international art ruckus :