Tokyo University of the Arts

Open Spatial Workshop's Metabolic Scales

This video lecture introduces the work of the Australian based collaborative group Open Spatial Workshop and discusses their work ‘Metabolic Scales 2022-2025’, exhibited in These Entanglements: Ecology After Nature at the University of Queensland Art Museum in 2025. Based on research and fieldwork in the Pilbara, Western Australia on the lands of Nyamal and Kariyarra custodians, as well as in Matsudo Japan, Metabolic Scales registers biological, geological, and social entanglements through the unbounded consumption of iron ore. The lecture traces multiple material flows explored in this work from the earliest forms of microbial life to the extraction of ore, and the circulation of this mineral on the global market, including its use in Japanese steel production. Terri Bird is an artist and writer living on the unceded lands of the Kulin Nation in Naarm (Melbourne). She works as an Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Art at Monash University. Her research focuses on sculptural practices that connect art's material operations to matter's potential force and dynamics. This project owes a debt to the rethinking of material relations that has been a focus of feminist philosophers seeking to problematize understandings of matter outside its customary associations with form, content and meaning. Since 2003 Terri has worked collaboratively with Bianca Hester and Scott Mitchell as Open Spatial Workshop (OSW). Their work explores connections between materiality and the politics inscribed in place, that connects colonial legacies and their environmental consequences.