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Accepted Paper:
Paper short abstract:
As symptom and driver of rapid planetary transformations, mining makes visible the otherwise invisible and subterranean grounds of modern substance dependencies. USSR’s uranium mining in GDR landscapes exemplifies the 'Socialist Anthropocene', the colonial extractivism of a communist empire.
Paper long abstract:
This paper engages with one of the world’s three largest uranium extraction projects, run from World War II until the fall of the USSR in regions of the former GDR. While above ground the socialist project was promising people new, bright futures, the highly secret mission of the company ‘Wismut’ was mining the radiant resource underneath the Earth to provide the Soviet empire with material for nuclear weapons and energy, in a cealed-off microcosm of extraction, labour and pollution. With the fall of communism in 1989/90, the new federal government ended the production and put large-scale restoration plans into place, transforming many of these exhausted, contaminated socio-ecological landscapes into restoration areas.
Yet, the toxic heritage to the present is affecting the human and non-human inhabitants of these minescapes, their water bodies and soils, as well as the collective and cultural identity of their inhabitants, while new projects of ‘green mining’ of Lithium, Copper and other metals are underway.
Transsecting these areas through theory and transdisciplinary modes of situated engaged practice, this paper asks how, in light of the ‘metabolic rifts’ that rural mining regions exemplify and embody, different futures for these extracted landscapes of the Anthropocene can be envisioned. This multi-scalar study is a call for experimentally exploring and exercising forms of commoning place-based, yet planetarily networked knowledge practices, for perceiving, inhabiting and collectively acting upon the local/global, rural/urban, social, energetic and ecological flows, relations and injustices, by crossing arts, activism, social, Earth and life sciences, epistemologies and societies.
Mineral Empire: a socio-environmental history of mining in formal and informal empires, 18th-20th centuries
Session 2 Tuesday 20 August, 2024, -