LandRush contributed two projects to the World of Matter exhibition “Exposing Resource Ecologies” at the Leonard & Bina-Ellen Gallery at Concordia University in Montréal. We presented our interactive LandRush-App on two iPads, and showed White Gold, about global cotton production’s social and environmental effects, as a six-channel video installation.

Exposing Resource Ecologies brought together seven works produced by World of Matter, an international art and media project investigating primary materials (fossil, mineral, agrarian, maritime) and their complex ecologies. Initiated by an interdisciplinary group of visual practitioners and theorists, World of Matter responds to the urgent need for new forms of representation that shift resource-­‐related debates from a market-driven domain to open platforms for engaged public discourse.

“World of Matter considers a planetary perspective on a world that matters.”

World of Matter’s method of working and gathering, sharing, and debating knowledge is driven by a desire to build an expanded public commons, which constitutes an engaged social practice. The group’s thrust is global in scope. It is sensitive to inequalities between and within areas of the global South, worsening poverty, and the pervasiveness of corporate exploitation of labor and resources worldwide. Critical of a human-­‐centered approach to resource extraction, the World of Matter projects are informed and shaped by a broad field of actors (human and non-­‐human), diverse disciplines, and cultural filiation. The urgent need to foster debate in the transnational public arena – a debate that opens the possibility for different modes of social organization – has led the various practitioners to embrace an open­‐access approach in their online platform. This approach valorizes visual material as a tool for building agency and diversifying its mode of exchange by “acting” through exhibitions, symposia, texts, and other public events.