Manono, Democratische Republiek Congo

In her work Earthing Discharge (2020), Marjolijn Dijkman (b. 1978, Groningen) visualizes the corona discharge of lithium ore quarried in Manono, a mining town in the Tanganyika province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 2018, the Australian company AVZ discovered high concentrations of lithium in Manono’s soil, prompting a global race to extract the precious metal (Arndt and Gueye 2020, 33). The world’s two largest economies are both seeking to exploit the town’s lithium deposits: a Chinese company signed the first contract to extract Manono’s lithium in 2022 (Jan 2025), and the California-based company KoBold Metals was granted permission to launch a large-scale mineral-exploration campaign in 2025 (Reuters 2025).

C.S.H.

References

Arndt and Gueye 2020

Arndt, Lotte, and Oulimata Gueye. “On-Trade-Off: Countering Extractivism by Transnational Artists’ Collaborations.” Commodity Frontiers: Capitalism, Contestation, and the Transformation of the Global Countryside 1 (2020): 32–42.

Jan 2025

Jan, Guillaume. “In the DRC, Chinese and American Companies Race for Lithium.” Le Monde, 30 July 2025. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/le-monde-africa/article/2025/07/30/in-the-drc-chinese-and-american-companies-race-for-lithium_6743912_124.html.

Reuters 2025

“KoBold Metals Granted Seven Congo Lithium Exploration Permits.” Reuters, 21 August 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/kobold-metals-granted-seven-congo-lithium-exploration-permits-2025-08-27/.