Potential places the language of mineral extraction besides the language of ecological protection. Built from verbatim policy texts, layered drawings of empty institutional rooms, and a composed soundscape, the film lets the words “potential” and “underutilized” circulate through vacant spaces, while the land they describe remains unseen. The documents it draws from speak with genuine ambition, but they also reveal a fragile space between policy, implementation, and accountability, between what is promised for the future and what is permitted in the present.
The film is part of the ongoing Extractions project.
Director´s Statement
“Underutilized European mineral potential” appears in the recitals of Regulation (EU) 2024/1252, the Critical Raw Materials Act, as a description of what lies beneath the ground in Europe. It is a bureaucratic phrase. It is also a political one, a way of naming land in terms of what has not yet been taken from it.
I encountered this language while working around Fensfeltet (the Fen Complex) in Telemark, Norway, a landscape currently subject to a major rare earth mining proposal. At the same time, I was reading international biodiversity frameworks, industry principles, and the CRMA’s own provisions on permitting, sustainability, monitoring, and public interest. These documents are not written in opposition to one another, and they hold many of the same contradictions about extraction and protection, urgency and caution, restoration and loss, value and responsibility. The divide between these visions of a managed future and the actual present of the ground felt increasingly strange.
“Potential” places the words from these documents next to each other and listens for what happens. All spoken language in the film is drawn verbatim from policy texts and frameworks. The words are arranged and repeated as found poetry, not commentary.
The images, layered drawings of empty institutional chambers and animated papers, are the landscapes that regulatory language inhabits on its way to a decision.
