A Brussels collective of artists, journalists and researchers whose subject is mining, and whose flagship work is an immersive role-play staged for the industry that decides how cobalt is sourced. Participants take the parts of a mineral supply chain, artisanal miners among them, and at the 2025 OECD Forum on Responsible Mineral Supply Chains the scenario asked what a cobalt mine built under the 16th arrondissement of Paris would ask of the people living there. The European Partnership for Responsible Minerals organised that session in close collaboration with the collective, ran it twice in one week, and took the work to Mining Indaba in February 2026. In the DRC the collective works from Lubumbashi, where it has staged at the Université de Lubumbashi and the Belgian consular residence with Enabel, Wallonie-Bruxelles International and ULB Coopération. The Belgian enterprise register holds no legal person under this name: it is a collective of individuals, and the association it credits as its development partner, Afropean Project ASBL, carries no registered link to it. Its relationship to artisanal cobalt is thematic. It operates no site, cooperative, dataset or programme, and the Dutch aid-transparency record shows no EPRM grant to it. The closest operational tie belongs to one member: Brieuc Debontridder, author of the book the experiment is drawn from, sits on the Fair Cobalt Alliance Advisory Board and worked on a study of child labour in artisanal cobalt mines in the DRC.
Sources support the description and the individual connections below. Publication and checking dates belong to the evidence: when it was published, and when this Hub last read it.
Reported means the cited source describes the relationship at its evidence date. Historical relationships refer to an earlier period. Announced agreements may not have been implemented. None of these labels confirms that trade continues today.
EPRM organises the collective's social experiment and is named by the OECD as doing so “in close collaboration with the Collectif Cobalt”: twice at the 2025 OECD Forum on Responsible Mineral Supply Chains, then at Mining Indaba in February 2026. The collective credits the Paris run “avec le soutien d’EPRM”, a credit it attaches to that performance alone. This edge records a collaboration with per-event support. A search of the Dutch aid-transparency data RVO publishes, where this Hub sources three other EPRM grants, returned no grant to the collective, so EPRM is recorded here as a partner in staging rather than as a funder.
Forum de l'OCDE pour les chaînes d'approvisionnement en minerais responsable - Paris 2025 — Avec le soutien d'EPRM
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'Cobalt': an immersive, community-centred social experiment
Organised by the European Partnership for Responsible Minerals (EPRM) in close collaboration with the Collectif Cobalt