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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the limit is acutely experienced in a former mining community in Romania. I will tackle some challenges in comprehending endings and discuss endings and beginnings, the ever-expanding limits in the conversations between people and between people and other actors.

Paper long abstract:

The former mining village of Corna, in Romania, has for the past twenty-three years been labelled as disintegrating and destined for extinction. Following the proposal for an open-pit mining project, the community has slowly disintegrated, revealing the importance of continuity of space and time for the integrity of the social fabric in this small village, and vice versa: the importance of stability of social connections for creating and re-creating narratives of completeness and for preventing the dissolution of space and time. In this paper I explore how the limit is acutely experienced in Corna in the gaps, fissures and holes of the social, spatial and temporal fabric. Since the mining project was first proposed, there have been many clashes, revealing edges and limits that had previously gone unnoticed in the seemingly straightforward conversations among people and between them and their surroundings. Today more than seventy percent of the village has moved away, and those who remain live in a permanent state of uncertainty, continually awaiting an ever approaching end. I will show how these unfolding processes have fractured space, time and social-ecological relations, leaving behind a sense of unease.