Tantalum Technology

Almost all electrical appliances are made with electronic circuit boards that all have copper wiring, which in many cases is coming from copper mines in Congo. All the books I've consulted and documentaries I've seen, lead me to believe that most workers in the mine (les creuseurs) don't know themselves what the materials they are extracting are used for. The promising global knowledge distribution, made possible thanks to computers and smart phones, inter-connected by Internet, did not make it back to it's point of departure. The gap between the beginning and the end, between cause and consequence, is unbelievably big. Regardless of the fact that so called 'blood minerals' were regularly in the news recently, an equal amount of end users of the minerals does know nothing about its origin. The recent bans on import of 'blood minerals' from Congo only lead to more illegal export to neighbouring countries from where export of minerals does not pose any problems.

I want to bring both worlds closer to each other by letting the miners sculpt the telephones, laptops, ipads and computers directly in to the rocks. The archetype of technological revolution is thus embedded in stone. A monumental fossil for the future, looking back at a world in which the gap between rich and poor, between the extractors of the minerals and the end consumers is so big, and willingly kept so big, that it is hard to imagine it will ever change.