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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太平洋海底的波希米亚：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是中东欧的国际海洋金属联合组织（IOM）。我问，国际移民组织自 1987 年成立以来，作为一个机构如何以及为何能够生存下来，尤其是与弗拉蒂斯拉夫·库比什塔 (Vratislav Kubišta) 的个人档案打交道。库比什塔是一位冶金学家，也是国际移民组织前副总干事，退休后寻求在当地建立一个深海采矿博物馆。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著作，将 IOM 的历史和库比什塔的收藏置于资源推测和预期空间内的废墟、未建成和多重时间性体验的叙述中。我认为，国际移民组织的历史强调了无限期暂停的临时性中的资源、随之而来的数据以及在当前尚未发生的不断变化的政治、经济和科学环境下的科学劳动和生活的偶然性。在拓宽这个再次成为激烈争夺的潜在资源的历史时，这篇报道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描述这种做法。