Finding Silver
Artistic Research, Performance
Mar – May 2023
Over three months, I was mining precious metals from
the waste streams of the city. This project began with a
fascination for silver and the growing tension between its
increasing demand and the critical ecological and human
costs of its extraction.
I started looking for silver from old silver jewelry and vintage cutlery, but soon discovered silver’s vital role in electronics due to its exceptional conductivity. This led me to scrapyards, trash piles, and secondhand stores, collecting broken and obsolete devices. The process of dismantling them, sometimes delicate, sometimes requiring the blunt force of a hammer.
The recovered silver was transformed with its friend copper – in natural mining, silver is found as a secondary metal alongside copper, and in dismantled electronics, the same relationship emerges. I combined them into jewelry and then created a performance piece wearing the jewelry: a song for the life cycles of metal, performed with my silver flute. The work celebrated the journeys of metal meanwhile questioned of the intensive labor and resources required to extract them from the earth.
I started looking for silver from old silver jewelry and vintage cutlery, but soon discovered silver’s vital role in electronics due to its exceptional conductivity. This led me to scrapyards, trash piles, and secondhand stores, collecting broken and obsolete devices. The process of dismantling them, sometimes delicate, sometimes requiring the blunt force of a hammer.
The recovered silver was transformed with its friend copper – in natural mining, silver is found as a secondary metal alongside copper, and in dismantled electronics, the same relationship emerges. I combined them into jewelry and then created a performance piece wearing the jewelry: a song for the life cycles of metal, performed with my silver flute. The work celebrated the journeys of metal meanwhile questioned of the intensive labor and resources required to extract them from the earth.
