Bohemia at the Pacific seabed: Archiving the future of deep-sea mining with the Interoceanmetal Joint Organization

Abstract

This article uses historical and ethnographic methods to examine the primarily East-Central European Interoceanmetal Joint Organization (IOM). I ask how and why the IOM has survived as an institution since its inception in 1987, working especially with the personal archive of Vratislav Kubišta. Kubišta was a metallurgist and former Deputy Director General at IOM who after retirement sought to develop a local deep-sea mining museum. This is a story about the work that archives do, but even more about how institutions maintain archives. I draw on recent work in the history and anthropology of time and archival practice to situate IOM’s history and Kubišta’s collection in narratives of ruin, the unbuilt, and the experience of multiple temporalities within spaces of resource speculation and anticipation. I suggest that IOM’s history highlights the contingencies of resources in the temporality of indefinite pause, their attendant data, and scientific labor and life under the shifting political, economic, and scientific circumstances of the ongoing not-yet. In broadening the history of what is once more a hotly contested potential resource, this account speaks to the claims of contemporary would-be seabed miners, who frequently frame the practice in terms of innovation, urgency, and novelty.