Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Pisters, Patricia

Titel

Deep Blue Geomediations: Following Lapis Lazuli in Three Ecological Assemblages

Ist Teil von

• SubStance, 2018-01, Vol.47 (2), p.36-58

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Here I can only highlight a few elements of this complex socio-political ecology that surrounds the blue treasures. Because of its strategic location and its natural resources, Afghanistan has been not only a player in global trading in the Silk route networks, but also a force field in geopolitics. In a very simple way, it signifies also the presence of foreign powers in Afghanistan and the mines. Since the end of the Second World War in 1945, America, Saudi Arabia, Britain and the Soviet Union (and later also Pakistan) have been intervening for control.8 In 1979, the Soviet Union, called upon by the Afghan government, invaded the country to fight the rebellious Mujahedeen (who had received support from the United States). [...]its aesthetic and symbolic properties, as I already touched upon in the first section when discussing the quality of its pigments in Western art history, are directly implicated in its value, giving it sometimes magical properties, sung by poets, captured in pigments on countless paintings, but also symbolically referred to in language, in popular culture, and art cinema. If we follow the lapis lazuli of the Serr-i-Sang mines across the different ecological assemblages as I have attempted to do above, we can consider the deep-blue stone itself as a particular form of "geomediation" in which the material of the earth itself becomes an agent with variegated singular properties, containing its vibrancy, luminosity, color and energy that transforms into different forms of expression, touching humanity with a sense of mortality and immortality, earthly connection and transcendence. [...]the stone is a reminder of what Jussi Parikka calls the "geology of media" (Parikka), a reminder of the fact that all our media, far from being in an immaterial cloud, are profoundly connected to our planetary resources, and that the ease with which Google Earth gives us virtual access to the world deeply depends on its material, which can only be accessed at high costs of human and nonhuman labor.