Film / Ceramics / Installation
Nb41 is a speculative ethnography of niobium (Nb), a strategic mineral central to contemporary technologies, particle accelerators, and scientific infrastructures. This research-creation takes the form of an installation composed of a 45-minute experimental documentary film and a series of three ceramic glazed spheres. Rather than approaching niobium simply as a resource, the project engages it as an active participant in worldmaking — a narrative and relational agent embedded in networks of extraction, scientific knowledge, colonial history, and planetary transformation.
The film follows niobium across four sites: the boreal forests and geological formations of Quebec's Canadian Shield and the former St. Lawrence niobium mine in Kanehsatà:ke, unceded Mohawk territory; the rainforests of Vichada in Colombia's Guiana Shield, within Sikuani territory; the TRIUMF particle accelerator in Vancouver; and archival institutions in Canada, Colombia, and the United States.
Presentation of the project (5 min.)
The three ceramic spheres function as material meditations on deep time and planetary transformation, each referencing a distinct temporal horizon. Glazed with experimental mixtures of niobium oxide developed during a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity — where the film's narrative structure was also first developed — the mineral itself becomes a constitutive element of the work's surface, not merely its subject.
Together, film and ceramics hold scientific, colonial, ecological, and Indigenous temporalities in tension: not as fixed categories, but as unstable relations still shaping the present.
Ceramic sphere with niobium glaze, 33 cm diameter
This piece reimagines Rodinia, a supercontinent that formed over a billion years ago, long before plants or animals appeared on land. Geological studies suggest Rodinia was unusually rich in niobium — a rare metal that, billions of years later, would become central to advanced technologies and scientific exploration.
Ceramic sphere with niobium glaze, 33 cm diameter
This piece reimagines the 1507 world map, the first to inscribe "America" onto the world. Rendered as a glazed ceramic sphere, the piece transforms the flat colonial projection into a tactile planet — a reminder that the cartographic imagination was always entwined with extraction, possession, and the desire to remake the world in one's image.
Ceramic sphere with niobium glaze, 33 cm diameter
This piece imagines a supercontinent 250 million years in the future, when Earth's tectonic plates have once again converged. If Rodinia marks a world before extraction, Pangaea Proxima imagines what comes after: a planet bearing the full weight of what the intervening billion years set in motion.
Nb41 is a speculative research-creation project by Andrés Salas-Parra, unfolding across film, ceramics, mineralogy, scientific imaging, and extractive histories.
The work has not yet been publicly exhibited.
Year: 2026
Format: 45-min. experimental documentary film, ceramic installation (3 glazed spheres)
Ceramics developed in residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity
This project was made possible thanks to the generous support of
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
Canada Council for the Arts
Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ)
Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity