Extractions III: CoLab
A collaborative fieldwork and exhibition project, 2025

The third installment in Obrestad/Dølheim´s Extractions series, CoLab brings together artists, researchers, and local participants for an immersive investigation into landscapes under pressure from extraction, industrial transformation, and ecological disruption. This collaborative project explores how artistic fieldwork can become a space of resistance, care, and alternative knowledge-making,  where attention, gesture, and dialogue form a counter-cartography to dominant narratives of progress.

In 2025, CoLab unfolds in the forests surrounding the Fen Complex in Telemark, Norway, an area marked by proposals for rare earth mining and geopolitical interest. Here, the project engages with the forest as more than backdrop: a living archive, a vulnerable ecology, and a site of contested futures.

The project culminates in an exhibition and catalogue, presenting both the artistic outcomes and the traces of process: fragments, sketches, soil, sound, conversation. As with earlier Extractions works, it resists resolution, offering instead a collection of voices, gestures, and field-based imaginaries that that confront the overlapping pressures of ecology, economy, and time.