Lithium, copper, uranium, child labor, and the bed of the deep sea—the mining sector is one of the most contested and problematic arenas of consumer complicity today. EURO—VISION: Undergrounding the Critical Mineral begins not with a location or a specific resource, but with a fundamental question: what counts as extraction today? While we might picture drills and quarries, the deeper story unfolds across financial markets, trade policies, legal frameworks, and the metrics used to define what is “critical” in the first place. Taking the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act as a point of departure, this richly layered volume traces the hidden infrastructures and governing logics that shape how the mining industry moves substances from and across the Earth—and what these minerals, in turn, move with them. Developed by the artist duo FRAUD (Francisco Gallardo & Audrey Samson) in close collaboration with environmental humanities scholar Michaela Büsse, the book gathers a wide range of voices—artists, scholars, economists, activists, lawyers, and journalists—to reflect on the long genealogies of resource extraction, the valuation paradigms that uphold them, and the terminologies that give them legitimacy. But the story doesn’t stop there. In the context of EURO–VISION, “undergrounding” becomes a tactic: a means of unsettling the structural violence concealed behind seemingly neutral data, and of turning toward the mineral itself—its material presence, its histories, its speculative potential. Published in K. Verlag’s Processing Process series, EURO—VISION draws on FRAUD’s ongoing, research-led inquiry into critical mineral governance. Combining interviews, visual essays, and commissioned texts, it opens new pathways for thinking about the entanglements between geology, economy, and power. At once analytical and imaginative, the book invites us to see the subterranean anew—not simply as a resource, but as a site of resistance, relation, and possible futures. Help Us Close the Funding Deficit – Purchase a Limited Artist’s Edition and/or an A1 or A3 Poster Edition! If you’d like to explore a more materially expanded iteration of this project—and help us close the funding gap after one-third of the anticipated support was unexpectedly cut—please also take a look at the limited artist’s edition of EURO—VISION. It features a hand-pulled intaglio print on the jacket, using a phosphorescent phosphate pigment developed in collaboration with the chemistry lab at Loughborough University (UK). In addition, FRAUD have created a small wall print / poster edition (A1 and A3) as part of the same fundraising effort. Both the artist’s edition and the poster series not only deepen the material stakes of the project, they also directly support the costs of producing this book and sustaining our press. Thank you for your support. FRAUD (Audrey Samson, Françîcco Gayardo, Gris Perla Amor, and Jefa Papi Chulo) is an undisciplinary pack whose practice interrogates UK and European legal systems that perpetuate resource- and commodity-oriented relations. Over the past several years, as part of their ongoing project EURO—VISION, FRAUD has critically examined the UK’s Critical Minerals Strategy and the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act to inspire alternative cultural practices, political imaginations, and networks of mutuality and worldmaking. Former Somerset House Studios residents and current Stanley Picker Fellows (2024–25), in 2023 FRAUD was selected for Artangel’s Making Time. Their accolades also include the State of Lower Saxony HBK Braunschweig Fellowship (2020) and the King’s College Cultural Institute Grant (2018). They have been commissioned by Contemporary Art Archipelago (2022), the Istanbul Design Biennial (2020), RADAR Loughborough (2020), and the Cockayne Foundation (2018). FRAUD’s work is held in the permanent collections of the European Investment Bank Institute (Luxembourg) and the Art and Nature Center – Beulas Foundation (Spain). Michaela Büsse is an interdisciplinary researcher and practitioner based in Berlin. Her research explores environmental speculation and emerging material and territorial configurations shaped by planetary urbanization and the climate crisis. At K. Verlag, she is also the editor of Granular Configurations: Sand, Materiality, and Planetary Urbanization (forthcoming in Fall 2025), and a contributor to intercalations 5—Decapitated Economies.
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