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.

中文翻译：

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太平洋海底的波西米亚：与 Interoceanmetal 联合组织一起记录深海采矿的未来


本文使用历史和人种学方法来研究主要的东欧-中欧跨洋金属联合组织 （IOM）。我想知道国际移民组织自 1987 年成立以来是如何以及为什么作为一个机构生存下来的，特别是与 Vratislav Kubišta 的个人档案合作。Kubišta 是一名冶金学家，曾任国际移民组织 （IOM） 副总干事，退休后致力于在当地建立一家深海采矿博物馆。这是一个关于档案馆所做工作的故事，但更多的是关于机构如何维护档案的故事。我借鉴了时间历史和人类学以及档案实践方面的最新工作，将 IOM 的历史和 Kubišta 的收藏置于废墟、未建成的叙事以及资源投机和预期空间中的多重时间性体验中。我认为，国际移民组织的历史突出了资源在无限期停顿的时间性中的偶然性，它们随之而来的数据，以及在正在进行的尚未变化的政治、经济和科学环境中的科学劳动和生活。在拓宽再次成为激烈争论的潜在资源的历史时，这一叙述谈到了当代潜在海底矿工的主张，他们经常从创新、紧迫性和新颖性的角度来构建这种做法。