EURO—VISION

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 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.

Limited-Edition Silk-Printed Book Jacket Edition: A Fundraising Campaign

Concurrently to working on the book, we've launched a fundraising campaign in support of the book's production.

A limited edition of 50 copies of the EURO—VISION publication features a hand-made intaglio print book jacket infused with phosphorescent phosphate pigment developed by FRAUD in collaboration with the chemistry lab at Loughborough University during a residency at RADAR. The pigment, synthesized from Triple Superphosphate fertilizer, originates from OCP’s Bou-Craa mine in occupied Western Sahara—the world’s most concentrated phosphate deposit. Listed as a critical mineral on both the EU and UK critical materials lists, the phosphate rock was doped with Europium to produce its distinctive magenta glow. This material and color are also used in security features on EUR and GBP banknotes, visible under UV light.

This limited edition of the book further highlights the thematic and material significance of the EURO—VISION project. Your purchase directly helps to offset the costs of producing the book, which is available now for pre-order and will be shipped as soon as possible in mid-2025. 

To read more about the  A1 and A3 posters Triplesuperphosphate also launched as part of a joint fundraising campaign to support this project and its broader inquiry into critical minerals, please go here. These prints will ship immediately.

Every order helps us reach the funding needed to bring this project to life. Thank you for your support!

FRAUD (Audrey Samson, Françîcco Gayardo, Gris Perla Amor, and Jefa Papi Chulo) is an undisciplinary collective whose practice interrogates UK and European legal systems that perpetuate resource- and commodity-oriented relations. Over the past four 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), in 2023 FRAUD was recognized as selected artists 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 received commissions from 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.