{program_image_alt Lecture

School of the Art Institute Visiting Artist Lecture: Berenika Boberska's Exploration of California's Lithium Valley

Thursday, April 25 6:00-7:30 PM Buy Tickets Free but Reservations Required

​The Driehaus Museum welcomes the School of the Art Institute’s (SAIC) Mitchell Visiting Professor Berenika Boberska for a special evening in the Murphy Auditorium.

Boberska will discuss her recent project, Lithium Valley Rituals, a material examination of the Salton Sea in California and its vast lithium deposits. This is part of her ongoing exploration of extraction sites and alternate scenarios for the future transformation of toxic landscapes.
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From the crimson tailing pools of Searles Lake in the Mojave to the verdigris spillages of copper ore piles in Uganda, questions remain about how we can approach this new era of extraction differently.  The lecture is an expedition into the unexpected landscapes, materials, and imaginaries – the tailings and the tales brought on by our drive towards energy transition.

In her most recent project, Lithium Valley Rituals, Berenika Boberska explores alternate scenarios for future transformations of the Salton Sea area in California, unleashed by the discovery of ‘white gold’ – in what is proclaimed to be one of the world’s largest lithium deposits. The project explores the material and cultural potential of by-products, spillages and spoils; self-firing terracotta kiln structures made of overburden muds, or the almost alchemical color transformations of ceramic glazes which are endemic to the future lithium extraction sites.

As part of this quest, a series of fabricated artifacts: landscape tools, ceramic vessels, ceremonial dresses - part folkloric, part technological, ritualistic in their deployment - begin to embody ‘Future Folklores’ of extraction sites. Ideas of a Geologic Commons, and stewardship of toxic landscapes through much longer time frames, embracing not only ours, but the more-than-human and even mineral desires and agency.

About the Speaker:

Berenika Boberska is the Mitchell Visiting Professor at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago - in the Department of Architecture, Historic Preservation and Designed Objects.

Prior to coming to SAIC, she taught at Woodbury School of Architecture in Los Angeles, where she was the co-founder of the Hinterlands Institute - a series of expeditions, fieldwork-based design studios, and exhibitions that engaged with the space beyond the city. Her projects and teaching explore territories that have largely been overlooked by architecture: the anthropogenic landscapes of agricultural or mineral overdrive, altered grounds, post-extraction spillages, and their emerging darker ecologies. Her work crafts spaces that allow for a precarious flourishing of such tailings, both material and mythological. 

She is the founder of Feral Office based in Los Angeles - a practice at the intersection of architecture, landscape futurism, and speculative folklore. Boberska describes her studio as being akin to a laboratory, constructing ‘future artefacts’ and spatial prototypes. She often collaborates with scientists, especially material scientists, as in the recent project “Aperiodic Table of the Anthropocene”, exhibited at the TranSci Lab at University of Virginia.

Berenika Boberska was born in Poland and grew up in the UK. She received her Master of Architecture from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University of London, and Master of Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in London.

Photograph courtesy of the artist.