From 12-15 January 2020 the Gold Matters project organized a ‘Visualisation for Sustainability Conversations’ Workshop in Kejetia, Northern Ghana.

The workshop served to organize collaborations around visualisations of gold mining spaces, lifeways and projections of sustainable futures between residents of a mining community in Northern Ghana – including male gold miners, women involved in processing ore and schoolchildren – and researchers and artists.

The three-day workshop contained four activities:

Try-out of participatory methods for visualising mining landscapes (with the use of GPS and mapping software)

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Artistic collaboration in creating an art installation

Photography workshop with schoolchildren

Organization of the first Gold Matters pop-up exhibition (with photographic work from East and West Africa and South America)

Miners from the Southern part of Ghana – facilitated by Gold Matters – also participated, and this allowed for mutual exchange, shared learning and in-depth comparison of different spatial arrangements, mobilities and sources for sustainability in the small-scale gold mining sector.

The joint efforts to visualise the dynamics in mining landscapes and lifeways catalysed valuable conversations about the effects of changing technologies and the arrival of new (international) actors on mining sites for personal health in workspaces, the distribution of wealth and balancing acts for sustainable futures.

Photos: Nii Obodai, Cristiano Lanzano and Sabine Luning.