Project
Loren Kronemyer in Esperance
Original reflection, November 2025:
CLOSING THE LOOP
On 17 November 2025, Artist Loren Kronemyer returned for a final visit to Kepa Kurl/Esperance with Metatechnician Hosting. This dispatch reflects on their accumulated knowledge exploring the trajectory of munitions and metals that connect this place to the world.
TRAJECTORY
A circular economy posits continuous recycling, where value is accumulated through transformation of materials, rather than lost through degradation. As our cycle draws to a close, I will use this opportunity to present a reflection back through the stages of transmutation that occurred.
Our three-stage residency in Esperance has provided us with coordinates and collaborators that have come together across an elaborate cradle-to-cradle artwork we have called Materiel World. The title Materiel World borrows a word from the military: materiel, which refers to equipment, munitions, and other inorganic inventory besides personnel. The raw elements that make up this artwork have now completed their first round of reincarnation, forever binding sites of extraction that link Kepa Kurl/Esperance Western Australia, Lutruwita/Tasmania, and the rest of the world.
In September 2024, I conducted an E-Waste Buy-Back event at Cannery Arts Centre. Local residents were invited to trade in electronic waste, to be re-mined and used to create a recycled bullet, a warped re-imagining of the Western Australian gun buy-back that was underway at the time. To prepare for this event, we visited local shooting associations, private gun collectors, the local tip and e-waste consolidation point, and relics of famous electronic space waste that have rained down upon this region.
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Loren Kronemyer, e-waste buy-back event, 2024, Cannery Arts Centre's crows nest. Photo: Elizabeth Pedler. -
Loren Kronemyer, archival Esperance Clay Target Club, scanned photograph, 2025, Esperance Jetty. Photo: Esperance Clay Target Club. -
Loren Kronemyer, live bullet casting at Festival of Live Art F.O.L.A. [AKL], 2025. Photo: David St. George.
The community e-waste we procured was reverse-mined for copper. This raw material was cast into an inert bullet artwork, with supervision from licensed firearms experts. A live E-Waste Buy-Back and Bullet Casting experiment also took place in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland courtesy of Festival of Live Art [AKL]. The inert artworks produced by these events were then returned to the Mount Lyell Copper Mine in Lutruwita/Tasmania.
A film was made of this process. In September 2025, a version of this film was screened at Contemporary Art Tasmania, inside a partially functional reconstruction of the Esperance Pistol Club within the gallery. In November 2025, I brought the film back to its point of origin, for a screening at the Esperance Pistol Club indoor air rifle range, for members and collaborators.
As an American living in Lutruwita/Tasmania, I have historically avoided guns, and never owned a gun. If I was going to learn about guns as tools, I wanted to do so through a framework that was explicitly peaceful. This resolved into the imperfect idea of creating a recycled copper bullet. A bullet that could undo harm, made with the potential to return stolen, mined materials back into the ground. [A circular economy.]
