Marina Otero Verzier (Talk)

She/Her

Part of Session #3: Realms of Mutation (with Yasaman Sheri)
Saturday 18 June | 16:15 - 18:00
Location: Likeminds

Talk — Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction, Endless Growth, and Self-Optimisation

Marina Otero Verzier is an architect, curator and editor based in Rotterdam. Currently, Otero is the Head of the Social Design Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven. From 2015 to 2022, she was the Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut. Otero has been curator of the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018, and has co-edited the books Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021) More-than-Human (2020), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), Work, Body, Leisure (2018), and After Belonging (2016), among others. 

Compulsive Desires discusses how energy dreams and epistemologies, constructed on cravings for productivity and profit, connect the landscapes of resource extraction and by extension, the technologies, rhythms, and spaces of everyday life. It focuses on lithium and its role as a mood stabiliser and fuel for the so-called green energy transition. Whereas lithium is better known as a vital element for cheap, lightweight batteries, it also has a long-lasting affiliation to physical and psychological well-being, having been prescribed for treating mania and depression since 1817. Lithium dreams concretise the entanglement between extractivism and exhaustion, productivity and burn-out, in the face of climate catastrophe.