Lisa Rave
Europium, 2014

Single-channel video installation, color, sound
18 min 40 sec


In Europium (2014), Lisa Rave interweaves various layers of imagery and text, analyzing history’s repeating patterns in the complex interplay of culture, economy, and ecology. The video is titled after a rare earth mineral that will soon be mined from the ocean floor. With its sequences of images structured like a nautilus shell, its narratives nested within one another, the work draws intricate connections between ecology, currency, spiritism, and commodity fetish while questioning the idea of progress. Although it is named after the European continent, europium cannot be found there. Rave comments on past and current exploitation of “resources,” with a particular view to the colonial history in the Pacifi c and its ongoing reverberations. Poignantly, the first deep-sea mining intervention is likely to take place in the Bismarck Sea, in Papua New Guinea, a place colonised by Australia, Germany, and Great Britain, among others. The revenues will go mostly to Western companies and cause environmental damage affecting ecosystems and local communities. Rave connects the extraction of wealth with contemporary currencies such as euro notes, in which europium is used as a marker of authenticity. Europium is also employed in technologies such as mobile phones, video monitors, and projectors, similar to those used to screen Rave’s work.

Lisa Rave is living and working in Berlin, Germany