Mineralia

Student at: Goldsmiths University of London
Description: Unofficial Audio Guide to the Mineral Collection at the Natural History Museum
Location: London, UK
Year: March, 2015

Project official website: WWW.MINERALIA.CO

A project by MA Research Architecture students: Stine Alling Jacobsen, Amelie Buchinger, Marco Dell’Oca, Phoebe Eustance, Eldar Gantz, Jess Gough, Hania Halabi, Thomas Jenkins, Susannah Jones, Yasemin Keskintepe, Siobhan Leddy, Ion Maleas, Pietro Pezzani, Grace Philips, Laurie Robins, Savitri Sastrawan, Sarah Shattock, Sam Stork, Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe.

Thanks: Alyx Barker, Mafalda Damaso, Stef Newcombe-Davis, Susan Schuppli, Hamid Shahin, Sophie Stork and Adam Stork.

‘Mineralia’ is an audio accompaniment to the Natural History Museum’s mineral collection. This collaboratively composed sound work mimics and subverts the museum audio guide format in order to explore alternative ways of interacting with the display. Using the intimacy of a textured acoustic experience ‘Mineralia’ gives space to the histories and politics of display, specific to the Natural History Museum, which have somehow escaped representation.

The tracks that make up ‘Mineralia’ work across genres and between different styles to form an audio guide which can be listened in it’s entirety or broken down into sections. Some tracks take the style of conventional documentaries; pulling apart the labour relations and geopolitical organisations that effect mineral extraction. Others are more abstract in form and content, exploring aesthetic acoustics in order to address the space of the museum. Together the tracks offer an alternative, and intimate, way of engaging with the collection.

The specimens on display in the mineral collection construct a geological history; the curated minerals present us with an archive that organises nature and science. The collection has been assembled and classified into order by their chemical compositions and crystal structures. Embalmed in glass cabinets – for the purpose of illumination – they are consecrated to realm of the museological, to act as testimony to discovery and enlightenment.

In their vitrines the minerals lie motionless, dormant and quiet. The cabinets render their contents mute. Obedient to the museum’s logic of display, the minerals articulate a historical process of organisation, but in their mutability they are also in excess. Held within, and attached to them, are multiple histories and associations. How do we make audible the stories that are not present in these cabinets?

‘Mineralia’ is an attempt at considering these spaces of silence, and to excavate and preservethe histories and stories that cannot be heard in the Mineral Gallery. Together the audio tracks endeavour to summon stories untold, present unfamiliar histories and create an alternative space of listening.