Vanadium Landscapes: An Element of Duality and Contradiction by Kristofers Scipanovs, Royal College of Art, School of Architecture
The project locates itself in Russia, the second-largest vanadium producer in the world, and looks at Evraz, one of the largest metallurgical companies in the country. Following the supply chain of vanadium, the Russian landscape becomes abstracted into a series of anthropogenic systems and boundaries, becoming values which the Vanadium Landscape simulation is based on.
Approaching the mine as a point of conjuncture between the natural flow of vanadium and the anthropogenic use of the substance. Russian Mining Legislation sees Subsoil substance as State Property. Only once the substance crosses the legal boundary of the soil layer, it enters private ownership. In the case of Evraz, its ownership is further broken down into shares, voting rights and representative companies. The substance body defined by human systems of legislation, abstracting the physical body of vanadium into values.









