Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how anticipation for the revival of the Kosovar mining industry manifests in the temporal experience of vertigo. The mines fold the past into the present and future, inducing the vertiginous: a sense of stuckedness and waiting, as well as hope for an ‘extractive future’.

Paper long abstract:

Personal and collective futures in the ethnically divided city of Southern Mitrovica are anchored in the mineral resources of the Trepça mine complex. A symbol of modernist progress and a driver of economic growth during Yugoslav socialism, in the last two decades the Trepça mine found itself at the crossroads of postsocialist transformations and disputed statehood of the newly independent Kosovo. Following the north-south division of the city after the war in 1999, the mine complex, formerly located on both sides of the city, became a contested area between Kosovo and Serb governed north. Today, the rundown condition of the mines combined with ownership claims by the two states prevent its reactivation.

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with Southern Mitrovica youth, this paper examines how past mining success currently evokes aspirations about development, prosperity and the reunification of the divided city. However, poised between the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’, due to uncertainties surrounding Trepça’s revival, the present is experienced as dwelling in a lag time marked by suspension, waiting and anticipation for mineral extraction. The mine folds the past into the present and the future that manifests in the temporal experience of vertigo; a convergence of backward- and forward-looking that induces a sense of ‘stuckedness’ and exhaustive waiting, as well as hopes for an ‘extractive future’. This paper shows how decayed extractive industries and the vertiginous experiences they generate in an impovrished post-mining city, are bound to legacies of socialism and unresolved questions of state sovereignty.