Julian Ross: Tin is a central subject in Kasiterit, which can be at once ubiquitous and difficult to locate: on the one hand, it is everywhere, as it’s in our smartphones; on the other hand, its journey before arriving into our hands can be traced back to specific places, like Bangka island in Indonesia. Could you talk about how you explored this contrast?

Riar Rizaldi: When I was flying into Bangka island for the first time, I saw it was entirely covered in mining sites. Once I arrived, I talked to some miners and asked them, ignorantly, what they were mining. Their answer was tin and I asked “What for?”, to which they pointed at my phone and replied: “Our tin is in that phone. We’re mining tin to make that.” It was eye-opening for me. I started thinking about the material of tin creating technology, and therefore information, and therefore knowledge... and all this entanglement leading back to the island. People think of artificial intelligence as if it appears out of thin air, but it needs materiality, and much of its material essence comes from this little island that not even many Indonesians are familiar with.

JR: With Bangka island already being heavily mined, what is its future looking like? The island itself already looks futuristic, and the colours of the landscape look out of this world.

RR: It’s an altered landscape. The soil produces a chemical reaction that makes it look white. And the water is acidic; you can’t even touch it. There’s no other source of income than mining on Bangka island, but recently, the municipality opened up to tourism. The miners are against visitors because their presence causes landslides. But the place has a catastrophic beauty to it, which attracts tourists. I read that even renewable green technologies, like solar panels, require tin because it conducts electricity. Even with technology that isn’t destroying the planet, scarcity still exists. If the tin reserve is depleted, Bangka island will sink because the island itself is a tin bedrock.

JR: You point out that the Indonesian language has no tenses in Kasiterit. Did this idea shape the approach to your film?

RR: I have a big interest in unpacking the idea of time as the idea of time is quite different in Indonesia. The idea of clocks was brought into the country through the Dutch colonisers. When I was a kid, there was even this idea of “Indonesia rubber time”, which meant we are always late. Knowing this, I find it interesting that there aren’t any tenses in the Indonesian language—no past, present or future. The question of time, then, becomes a philosophical question that engages with ideas of free will and determination. Do things happen because they’re supposed to? Or is it possible to change the course of events? These are some of the questions Natasha, the AI, asks in my film.

JR: In Kasiterit, you describe capital as being animistic.

RR: It’s a provocation. I wanted to explore the mechanism of capital having some similarity to animism. Although different in practice, there are some similarities in the ways value is determined and developed. In capitalism, there’s commodity fetishism, which is value consumption. This is different to how indigenous people of Bangka island see tin. An exchange value exists, but of a different kind. Indigenous people gather tin for ornaments and accessories, which they offer as gifts. The gesture is an altruistic act and the material demonstrates and illustrates a social bond. But the current use of tin is far from that. The indigenous people on the island are marginalised—many miners think they’re cannibals and don’t interact with them.

Mining on Bangka island began in the 1st or 2nd century. They used to burn agricultural land in a form of ritual, and the tin that emerged from the soil were considered deities. In the 15th or 16th century, tin from Bangka island started to be used for cash coins in China and the neighbouring island of Sumatra so tin began to develop a different exchange value. When the Dutch arrived and colonised Indonesia, they used tin to braze their ships and make tin cans. A specialised company was built to do this, which is the origin of the state-owned mining company that still operates today.

JR: Kasiterit exists as a film, but there’s also an installation version, which is quite different in terms of scale.

RR: In Kasiterit (extended), I present it on two iPhones. I try to talk about how we can quantify tin on time and labour, which I then presented through the mechanics of the moving image. While the indigenous miners would take 21 minutes 33 seconds 3 frames to extract the amount of tin necessary for an iPhone, it only takes the state-owned company 9 frames. This calculation is based on the camera that I used to record the mining activities—which captures 24 frames per second. So I present two versions with different durations—9 frames, so not even a second, versus 21 minutes. For me, it’s interesting to think about time through cinematic language and framerates, because we consume all these images through modern technology, much of which derives from cinema.

JR: When people watch Kasiterit on Vdrome, they’ll be watching it on their own technological devices.

RR: And they will probably have Bangka tin inside of it!