Data Colonialism in Indonesia | Stefanie Wuschitz

The team interviewed thirty Indonesian artists and activists. An animated documentary film based on a book will unpack their experiences, stories and testemonies. Since the pandemic, Indonesia lies at the forefront of digitalisation and datafication. At the same time they cause a massive ecocide. Global mining and big tech companies export a constant flow of raw materials (Lithium, Nickel, Copper, Gold) to feed global supply chains, e.g. crucial minerals for chip production needed in server farms and for training algorithms. On the one hand AI de-contextualises and filters data for consumers. On the other hand it simplifies, erases and targets data in racialised communities, increasing segregation and repression.
While Data Colonialism propels the grabbing, storing and controlling of data and the extraction of conflict minerals, "critical" people educate, mobilize and fight back. Since August 2025, we experience a vibrant, creative and diverse movement of people in solidarity networks who protest and reclaim the narrative. By analysing the centuries old dynamics of subordination and resistance this project aims to document their transformative agency.

about the project

Data Colonialism in Indonesia. Artist’s Strategies against Digital Colonialism

Institute for Education in the Arts |FWF Elise Richter PEEK (V994)
11/2023–10/2027

Stefanie Wuschitz

Applying feminist new materialist practices this project thinks data colonialism in Indonesia together with anti-colonial struggles of the 1960s. The term data colonialism stands for the appropriation of raw data, which counts as a top-ranking resource. Reclaiming a position within a disrupted history of ideas, young Indonesian media artists create relevant online counter publics. Do strategies developed to face previous forms of colonialism still resonate in their work? Is Indonesia’s anti-colonial legacy still relevant in Indonesia's media art scene? Its ambivalent influence on current digital art has been insufficiently investigated. My research aims to contribute to a diffractive reading of gendered forms of oppression, art and data colonialism; and to answer the research question whether data colonialism silences artists to the extent that centralized violence could silence artists in Indonesia up until the late 1990s. 

Extractivism and the Arts | Anette Baldauf, Anca Benera, Rehema Chachage, Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew

In this presentation we reconstruct the unfolding of a KoEF project (Kooperation Entwicklungsforschung) that we realized together with artists, scholars, and community workers from the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in Addis Ababa, the Institute of Social Work and the Department of Creative Arts at the University of Dar es Salaam, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Across three gatherings in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), and Vienna (Austria), we explored how our surroundings are shaped by extractivism and dispossession, and how artistic practices have the potential to nourish an imagination of worlds beyond extraction. As we recognize extractivism to be founded on a dichotomic epistemology that grants agency and accumulation to the subject which extracts, and passivity and dispossession to the object extracted, we confront a way of thinking that sits at the heart of all colonial and imperial endeavors – the so-called "sophisticated ghost" that continues to haunt us today.

about the project

Extractivism and the Arts

Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies | OeAD Cooperation Development Research

10/2023–09/2026

Anette Baldauf

Anca Benera, Rehema Chachage, Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew

Daines Sanga, Bekele Mekonnen, Zena Mnasi Mabeyo, William Manyama, Eyob Kitaba, Deman Yusuf, Tseday Wondimu Shenkute, Safina Said Kimbokota, Mona Mwakalinga

Extractivism and the Arts argues that extractivism is at the center of today’s planetary crisis. To challenge this dominant form of world-making, the project suggests expanding the scope of the debate from the politico-economical sphere into the realm of culture and the arts. At the intersection of community work and the arts, artistic practices have the potential to challenge the dominant extractivist worldview; they can blur the lines that separate the extracting subject and the extracted object, and highlight the space in-between and beyond: Artistic practices are powerful means to bear witness to injustice; they foster sensibilities in relation to more-than-human others, including mountains and rivers that are equally affected by toxicity and waste. Artistic practices facilitate processes of mourning in the face of loss; they nourish relationships of care and stimulate desire-driven narratives about the not-yet and the not-any-more. To explore these potentialities, the project invites researching artists and community workers from Addis Ababa, Dar es Salaam and Vienna to gather in a series of semi-public events hosted alternately by the participating institutions. The aim of the project is to deepen our knowledge on the possibilities of anti-extractivist art and develop a common vocabulary that cuts across geographic borders. The final product of the project will be a "traveling suitcase", which holds a variety of objects, both material and immaterial. As an educational tool, it moves across time and space. It adapts to different geographies and facilitates alternative forms of world-making.

Project partners

Department of Creative Arts at the University of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania

Alle School of Fine Arts & Design at the Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia

Institute of Social Work in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania

Subterranean Imagination| Caitlin Berrigan

To visualize an aquifer requires a subterranean imagination. Aquifer is a relational concept that is not only water, but also the stone bearer. Water and rock are inseparable, yet they are often isolated from each other in our conceptual thinking. Our thinking rigidly confines stone to stasis and immutable form, and water to flowing, charismatic beings. Why is it so difficult for people to relate to rock? How can we visualize an aquifer while exercising a relational imagination, with water and rock together as one restless, two-spirited body? Silicon Valley’s infrastructures and land claims expand from Mountain View across I-80 into the rolling desert hills of Sparks, Nevada. It is the reverse path of the 1850s gold rush wealth, back into a desert whose topographies serve to conceal; and where lithium mining is intensifying in the proximity to the Numu and Nuwu people’s Kooyooe Pa’a (Pyramid Lake).

about the project

Cryptocrystalline: Geological Animacies and Data Capitalism

Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies | FWF Elise Richter PEEK (V1007)

03/2023–02/2027

Caitlin Berrigan

Cyptocrystalline stories the subterranean and the geological within an overlooked geography at the core of shifting strategies of power and technogovernance: the dispossessed deserts in the Great Basin of the US. It is an active volcanic region extending across parts of Idaho to Nevada and California. A vast desert with the largest and most ancient artesian water reservoirs on the continent, the Great Basin has been home to humans for over 20,000 years. It has been ravaged by settler colonialism, with the Gold Rush in the 1850s followed by contaminating nuclear weapons tests, drone control centers for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more recently, rare earth mining, AI and data centers, artistic earthworks, and experiments in corporate sovereignty. Tracing what I call "affective geologies", Cryptocrystalline focuses on resistances to toxic colonialism and data capitalism that forge connected relations with the inhuman.