Abstract

Abstract For PhD
Nb41: A Speculative Ethnography of the Element Niobium

Andrés Salas, Ph.D.
Concordia University, 2025
Nb41 is a speculative ethnography of niobium (Nb), a strategic mineral central to contemporary technologies, scientific research, cultural imaginaries, and Indigenous cosmologies and struggles. Structured through a written dissertation and an art installation comprising an experimental documentary film (45 minutes) and a series of ceramics, the project critically explores how niobium’s multiple materialities—geological, industrial, cultural, and spiritual—construct and modulate human understandings of the world. Grounded in fieldwork at sites such as the former St. Lawrence Niobium Mine in Oka, Mount Saint-Hilaire, the Omacha Natural Reserve in Vichada, and the TRIUMF particle accelerator in Vancouver, the research interweaves personal narrative, archival excavation, and theoretical inquiry.
The thesis moves through diverse institutional and archival spaces, drawing from materials at the National Film Board of Canada, Quebec National Archives, Canadian Museum of Nature, National Library of Colombia, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. A residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity allowed for a direct material engagement with niobium in ceramics, an innovative practice rarely explored in contemporary art, foregrounding an ecosophical approach to matter.
The theoretical framework brings into dialogue Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of relationality; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts of machinic phylum and Deleuze’s “power of the false”; Brian Massumi’s notion of semblance; Erin Manning’s articulation of research-creation as a practice of sensing and worlding through the minor gesture; Henri Bergson’s theories of creative evolution and cinematic perception; Walter Benjamin’s critique of technological modernity; Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s theory of racial capitalism; critical theories of logistics and extraction; and Davi Kopenawa’s Indigenous cosmology and relational thought. Through these frameworks, niobium emerges not merely as a technological input but as an active participant in the narration and construction of human and more-than-human worlds.
Ultimately, the thesis proposes an expanded, speculative engagement with matter. By materially re-appropriating niobium and re-reading its histories, it challenges extractive paradigms and reframes art-making as a transformative practice situated within ecological, technological, and cosmopolitical concerns.