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Commodity Frontiers Initiative explores the history and present of capitalism, contestation, and ecological transformation in the global countryside. Each themed issue includes articles and interviews with experts about studying and teaching commodity frontiers in theory and in practice. The Journal features reflections and reviews on the dynamics of capitalist expansion, social change, and ecological transformation on global as well local scales, in the past and at the present.

Issue 6 focusses on “Renewable” Energy Frontiers. From a technical point of view, renewable energy is energy from “natural” sources that can be constantly replenished; things like wind, sun, waves. Without a doubt, these are important fossil fuel alternatives. But when commodity frontier dynamics are the entry point for analyzing energy and energy transitions, the notion of renewability comes into question. To define an energy transition in technical terms without addressing the people who could make a transition possible, or the root causes of climate change, environmental degradation, and global inequality leaves a foundational question unanswered: in addition to energy, what else is being renewed in today’s renewable energy frontiers?

Several contributions in the Issue look at how renewable energy reproduces — or renews — extractive, colonial, exploitative relations. The first three articles are grounded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the mining of cobalt, a mineral marked as key for the renewable energy transition, including Maarten Vanden Eynde’s conversation with artist, documentary photographer, and journalist Pamela Tulizo who is living and working in Goma, in North Kivu, D.R. Congo.

Abstract: Renewable energy seems to be both inextricably and indiscriminately linked to the so-called ‘green energy transition,’ which is put forward as one of the necessary transitions to avoid further climate breakdown. Little attention is given to the extraction processes of the raw materials needed to produce and store renewable energy, or to the social disruption and inequality they bear and engender. Artist, documentary photographer, and journalist Pamela Tulizo is living and working in Goma, in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the most mediated conflictual and unresolved energy frontiers. In her work, she incessantly and without limitations renegotiates the iconography of black African woman throughout history, by restaging and (digitally) manipulating their representation in popular culture and media outlets. She includes raw materials and historical objects in the mix of her poignant alterations of the perceived reality of African women. In 2021, she opened Tulizo Elle Space, a cultural center that empowers women through art, while they metamorphose from merely carrying the burdens of the past into invincible Amazons of the future. This article is a conversation between Maarten Vanden Eynde and Pamela Tulizo about the urgency of shifting narratives related to the mysterious concept of renewable energy and the power of art to confront the present and imagine a different future.