Beyond the Seas Blue: Mining the Museum

Asma Kazmi

2024

Medium: Digitally generated image.

Dimensions: 48”x28”

Price: Upon request

Description: Designer: Jillian (Lee) Crandall Beyond the Seas Blue is a series of speculative digital prints that reimagine the Sar-i Sang lapis lazuli mine in northern Afghanistan as an experimental subterranean museum. Drawing on fabulism, the project symbolically returns dispersed lapis-based artifacts—both Western and non-Western—to their geological origin. In doing so, it traces the deep history, vitality, and knowledge embedded in this semi-precious stone, while also intervening in museological conventions that have long upheld extractive and colonial practices. Mined for over 6,000 years, lapis lazuli from Sar-i Sang has been valued for its intense blue hue flecked with pyrite, its rarity, and its reputed metaphysical properties. By digitally reconstructing the mine as a speculative museum, the project challenges the logic of the white-cube gallery and instead situates the subterranean site as the ultimate provenance of these objects. Historical documents, geographic surveys, visual archives, and premodern South Asian art serve as source material for these reconstructions, reframing narratives of cultural exchange and production. The project unfolds through several speculative components. In Mining the Museum and Speculative Sar-i Sang Mine, Kazmi envisions a future museum located within the mine itself, where displaced lapis artifacts might symbolically return home. In Alchemy Workshop, she imagines the ancient processes of transforming raw stone into pigments and materials, reconnecting artisanal labor with research and scientific inquiry. The work also extends to the present: linking the destructive histories of mining to contemporary extractive practices, such as the immense use of water and electrical power for artificial intelligence, and the extraction of minerals, metals, and labor from places like the Democratic Republic of Congo. These practices exacerbate climate change, consolidate wealth and political power, and contribute to an increasingly inequitable world. Ultimately, Beyond the Seas Blue challenges the extractive nature of Western museums and industries, foregrounds marginalized histories, and asks: What would it mean to return stones and minerals to the earth from which they were taken? By staging such symbolic returns, the project gestures toward reparative possibilities and suggests that imagination itself may be a form of resistance—one that allows us to rethink our relationship to matter, memory, and the planet.