Extractions

An ongoing art/research project by Linn Obrestad & Hilde Iren Dølheim

Extractions / Extractions Forward is an umbrella project for films, installations, performances, texts, and collaborative field processes, developed by Linn Obrestad and Hilde Iren Dølheim through long-term engagement with contested landscapes.

The project begins in Telemark, Norway, around Fensfeltet / the Fen Complex, where proposals for rare earth extraction are reshaping how land is spoken about, thought about, governed, and imagined. From this local starting point, Extractions follows the echoes outward, into supply chains, infrastructures, data systems, and the cultural narratives that frame extraction as “transition,” “development,” or “necessity.”

Extractions explores “extraction” in several senses, both through the physical removal of materials, but also the wider ecological and cultural processes through which living places, and the knowledges tied to them, are reduced to resources. Rather than simplifying these tensions into a single, tidy, story, the project stays with contradiction, between local lifeworlds and global demand, technological optimism and ecological limits, and knowledge on the ground vs language in policy documents.

Methods / approach

Extractions is developed through fieldwork, listening, long-term return, collaboration, and care. We describe this as “complexity-sensitive artivism”: a quiet, durational practice that treats attention as a form of responsibility, and resists reducing contested landscapes to slogans or single stories.

Read the manifesto:
Complexity-Sensitive Artivism (2025)

The Norway/Brazil collaboration

Since 2024, Extractions has collaborated with Michelle Sales, curator and researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). The collaboration connects the Fensfeltet case to the mining landscapes of Minas Gerais, Brazil, a region with centuries of extractive history and ongoing conflicts between industrial mining, biodiversity, and local communities.

The two contexts are geographically distant but structurally linked as both are shaped by global demand for minerals framed as essential to the green transition, and both involve landscapes where ecological and cultural complexity is reduced to resource value. Extractions Forward, the working title for this collaboration, explores what it means to think these places together, across colonial histories, supply chains, and different traditions of resistance and knowledge-making.

The collaboration includes joint fieldwork, festival programming through EcoEchos, and planned research visits to Minas Gerais in 2026.

Project formats under the Extractions umbrella

Extractions includes several public formats and related works, including:

• EcoEchos Film Art Festival (Norway / Brazil), a festival format developed under the Extractions umbrella

• Extractions CoLab, curated artistic fieldwork, collaboration, exhibitions, and live events

• Performances / lectures and public conversations

• Standalone works (film, installation, text, and sculptural works) developed within the project context