"100" (2025)

For our 1st anniversary we unveil an installation marking 100 years of mining at Trepça. These minerals come from Stantërg / Stari Trg, the oldest mine within the huge Trepça complex, 55 km north of Prishtina. Developed by a British mining company in the 1920s, shortly after Serbia’s conquest of Kosovo, Trepça was taken over by Nazi Germany during World War 2 until Yugoslav Partisans gained control in 1944, beginning a new era of maximising basic extraction with little investment.

During Trepça's perceived golden age, 1960 - 1981, employment rose from 8,000 to 22,885 in 1988. It became a centre of protest when Milošević moved to revoke Kosovo’s autonomy in Yugoslavia. 1200 miners staged an 8-day hunger strike underground in 1989 to defend Yugoslavia’s 1974 constitution. The strike became totemic, but failed to prevent the illegal crackdown that heralded Yugoslavia’s violent break-up.

The minerals you see suspended here as if at a moment of Big Bang, generously donated by Trepça, have been extracted 750 metres underground by miners still working in stark, remote conditions - 50C heat, wet, dirty, dusty, unprotected. Yet the lead and zinc ore from these remotely, primitively mined stones finds its way into our pockets, into our modern gadgetry – our mobile phones. Trepça’s lead and zinc also feature in car batteries. These crystals — raw, striking, and luminous — are more than geological marvels. They are carriers of time, mute witnesses of struggle, their deeper timeline now converging with that of our recent decades of resistance and liberation.

TREPÇA’S EARLIER HISTORY: Mining at Trepça dates back to Roman times and expanded in the Middle Ages after Serbian kings invited in Saxon miners. The name Trepça features in a Papal charter of 1303. Stari Trg produced lead, zinc, silver and gold. The Ottomans took over the mine from 1455. Devastation caused by their wars with the Holy League caused mining to die out in the late 17th century. Trepça’s modern industrial revival started with assessments of its lead and zinc deposits in the 1920s, instigated by Yugoslav prime minister Nikola Pašić and his son Rade, leading to a 50-year concession agreement with the British mine financing house Selection Trust upon conclusion of its exploratory operations in 1925. In 1927 Selection Trust launched its Trepça Mines Limited subsidiary in London, started production in 1930, and operated the mine until World War Two.