Bitcoins and Berries

Due to a combination of generous governmental subsidies, natural resources, cold climate and cheap renewable electric power, the north of Sweden is an ideal location for the mining of the digital cryptocurrency, bitcoin. With the repurposing of old military buildings, Boden has become one of the centres of the bitcoin mining industry in Europe. The north of Sweden has also found itself as one of the centres of the superfood industry with wild berries being transported globally due to the invention of temperature-controlled storage and transportation.

Through screenings, location visit and presentations, Bitcoins and Berries will foreground the often-obscured structural conditions (climate, legislation, labour and storage) that allow these two industries to operate in relation and side-by-side within this geography.

Guests include: Marina Otero Verzier, Benjamin Gerdes, Johannes Samuelsson, and film screening of Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities by Liu Chuang.

13.00 Presentation, Benjamin Gerdes

14.00 Presentation, Berry Seasons by Johannes Samuelsson

15.00 Presentation, Marina Otero Verzier

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).

Benjamin Gerdes is an artist, writer and organizer who works with video, film and related public formats. He is interested in the intersections between radical politics, knowledge production and popular cultural ideas. His work focuses on the affective and social consequences of economic and state regimes, and examines methods for art and cultural projects to contribute to social change. Benjamin Gerde’s projects arise through the articulation of long-term research processes that are carried out in dialogue with activists, trade unions, architects, urban planners, geographers and archival researchers.

Johannes Samuelsson is an artist and documentary photographer working in Umeå. Within his art practice, he uses journalistic, essayistic and documentary working methods, and often investigates the role of art in social planning processes.