The Phosphorite Debate

In the 1980s, the environmental protests both rejected the mass-industrialization of local resources and galvanized the Estonian independence movement. Analyzing the historical precedent as a starting point, the focus of the discussion shifts to contemporary developments. The statements on two opposing video screens will inquire into a range of issues enabling connections between politics, civic processes, technological developments and built infrastructures in order to establish an understanding of the complex phenomena as space for architectural interventions to deal with its consequences.
The Baltic Pavilion's curatorial team summoned a public forum for two days in February 2016. With invited designers, planners, paleoecologists, environmental activists, geologists and representatives of the mining industry the focus was on society’s relationship to mining—how Estonia and the Baltic region relates to its mineral resources and industries involved. The round table discussions traced the ideas relating society to its material space and resources. Both extremes of this debate—the condition of mining and not-mining—consist of their inherent material and immaterial infrastructures, technologies and strategic argumentation where visionary thinking meets provisionary control of the environment, while creating complex material, bureaucratic, political, civic conditions to enable or disable the process.
The result renders out as an operative image or a diagram charting those two opposites, the conditions of mining and not mining with the aim to understand their interrelations as specific parameters for possible further formulations of architectural agendas and ideas on modes of intervention possible in the region.