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Centre for Visual Arts and Culture
A visual of an abstract eye

Post-Extractive Imaginaries talk series

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11 February 2026 - 11 February 2026

4:00PM - 5:00PM

Online - Teams

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Post-Extractive Imaginaries is a public conversation series with Durham University’s Centre for Visual Arts and Culture, bringing leading artists and researchers together to explore the cultural, political and visual legacies of extractive modernity. It examines how visual culture engages with land, labour, technology and value, and how new imaginaries emerge through artistic and critical practice. The series is organised by Michael Crang, Rosalind Hayes and Laura Sillars.

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Photograph of Penrhyn Slate Quarry

The Edge of Ruin - Marc Wilson

Centred around the work The Edge of Ruin, that discusses the legacy of industry on the physical landscape of the UK, in both Geography and Metaphor.

The work is centred around 40 locations in the UK where industry has taken place and the current landscape is a formation created by that industry, through extraction and spoil.

A landscape today where the industry is silent, but the echoes of this past sing loudly, both in physical form and the continued effects on the current surrounding environment.

This physical legacy is a reflection of past land use but also the wider environmental implication of humanity on the planet, in terms of the environment, economics, land use, ownership and social history.

Bio
Documenting memories, histories and stories set in the surrounding landscapes, Marc Wilson works on long-term documentary and topographic projects.

He often blends landscape, documentary, portrait and still life photography as well as audio interviews. The result is a web of deeply connected histories and stories that aim to tell us as much about our present – and even our future – as they do our past.

 

The Post-Extractive Visualities 2026 programme includes contributions from Marc Wilson, whose project The Edge of Ruin examines sites of rationality, power and their limits; Esther Leslie, whose work on cultural histories of industry, materials and modernity offers critical frameworks for understanding extraction and its afterlives; and Helene Engnes Birkeli, whose practice engages with post-extractive thinking through artistic and research-led enquiry. Please see sidebar for links to the other events in the series. 

Pricing

Free to attend.