COBALTTHE HAUNTOLOGYOFSHOPLIFTING·HARAWAYDRCGHOST⇶MINERALSUPPLY CHAIN·
COBALTTHE HAUNTOLOGYOFSHOPLIFTING·HARAWAYDRCGHOST⇶MINERALSUPPLY CHAIN·
melletios
tioś
The
Hauntology
of
Shop
lifting
Cobalt, colonial infrastructure,
and the ghost inside every machine
Artist Statement
Your phone contains cobalt. So does your laptop, your electric car, the server running your AI query. That cobalt most likely came from the Democratic Republic of Congo, extracted from land that belonged to people who were never asked, by workers, many of them children, who earn almost nothing. The mine does not appear on your screen. The hands that dug it do not appear in your feed. They are the ghost in the machine, and the machine does not acknowledge ghosts.
Donna Haraway taught us that we are all already cyborgs, merged with our tools, our networks, our infrastructures. But the cyborg has a supply chain. Every connection runs through a material history of dispossession, and that history does not disappear when the interface loads. It haunts. It persists in the ore, the battery, the blue.
Hauntology, the concept drawn from Derrida and sharpened by Mark Fisher, names this condition: the way the past refuses to stay past, the way colonial structures continue to operate through the present tense of technology. We are never simply online. We are online through something, on top of something, extracted from someone.
This work holds the cobalt rock as both object and index. It is beautiful, dense, electric blue. It is also a crime scene. The work asks you to stay with that contradiction rather than resolve it, to remain present to the ghost rather than scroll past it.
Cobalt
V3
AI-generated cobalt mineral specimen. The source images were scraped from product listings, geological databases, and mining company reports. The AI learned the shape of cobalt from images produced by the industry that extracts it.
Cobalt is listed on the London Metal Exchange. It trades at around USD 30,000 per tonne. The miners who extract it in Katanga province earn on average USD 1 to 2 per day. The gap between those two numbers is the ghost.
The blue is extraordinarily beautiful. This is part of the problem.
No/
oN
oN
I think the apocalypse will be at noon. The Doomsday Clock counts to midnight. It is currently 100 seconds from 12. But the Doomsday clock is analogue, it could be 100 seconds from midnight, or from noon. Perhaps at noon, when no one is expecting it, the world will just end. I can see myself eating a sandwich, and then, not eating a sandwich.
My kid, I mean my kids, say no. I'm pretty sure no was their first word. I mean if you think about it, a baby's first sound is a cry. A cry is a no to something, even before "thing" is a concept. Before Ma or Da, there is no. It is abstract, but total.
It often seems like being a parent is just saying no, but it's not really no. When a parent says no it is because we are saying yes to something beyond the kid. We are saying yes to standardised schooling, to friends, to family, to property, to work, to love, to tomorrow. We know saying no is the only way to say yes. But see a 2 year old say no, and tell me he is saying yes. I'm jealous of him. But I can also pick him up and strap him into a car seat.
When Beckett wrote "I can't go on, I'll go on", I always thought he meant it as the horror of the world continuing, even if you say no. The futility of no thrown into the gears of capitalism.
I'm interested in noon, in the no in daylight, by no one, on their own. The fact these nos have no impact is pretty cool. They do it despite it having no impact. Or maybe they don't. It's impossible to tell.
Text: Tim Gregory, 2022
Installation views · Sluice Lisbon 2022 · Territory
Sluice Lisbon · 2022 · Territory
Cobalt V3 · No/oN · Photographic works
The Hauntology of Shoplifting is an ongoing body of work examining the material history embedded in digital infrastructure. The cobalt rock is both sculpture and index, pointing toward the invisible supply chains that run beneath every networked surface.