Bauxite battles, aluminium reflections and the forced industrialisation of indigenous India

This paper is written by three of us responding at various distances and in different contexts to the issues developed in the book Out of this Earth, by Samarendra Das and Felix Padel. The book is an intimate study of the aluminium industry in eastern central India, investigating the deep dark structures of our modernity and the materials we depend upon for speed, communications and warfare. While Felix Padel and Zuky Serper, who work with the Centre for World Environmental History at University of Sussex bring us up to date reflections on the ongoing extraction battles, Naomi Salaman reflects on the limits of knowledge, information or teaching about materials in art education specifically. We three have worked together on this paper to bring a critical urgency to the celebration of aluminium as an art material.