Edward Zammit, Lauritz Bohne, Leo Scherer

Explorelab

Listen to the audio fragment about the project here.

Sensing Domesticity: From Mine to Mine

Every day, a detonation loosens ore from the earth in the middle of the Chilean Atacama desert. Copper, the material underlying any digital connection, is mined to construct our communication infrastructures, while the mining industry is destroying and contaminating an entire territory. 

From Mine to Mine challenges our understanding of architecture with its emerging context of data transmission and resource extraction. In a time of copper depletion, the project looks at three separate sites that have been widely affected by copper extraction and attempts to convert them into a new type of mine, made productive instead of destructive. The miner of the future accesses them remotely from home, a place where architecture becomes consumer and constructor of a territory in transition - from dependence on copper to alternate resources. By applying the method of transition design, current economic, ecologic and material dependencies are turned around, empowering the miner’s labouring body and giving agency to the house that shelters it.

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