Fossil landscape

Affective cartographic excavation of the Asturian coal transition

Abstract

When, in 2012, the Spanish government announced the phasing-out of the Asturian coal-mining industry, the mine workers’ movement organized the historic “Black March” on Madrid. The following year, I took part in the show Learning from las Cuencas at Gijón’s LABoral Centro de Arte, an artistic exploration of the problems of this industrial landscape’s future transformation. The landscape of the Asturian coalfields is at once industrial, rural, urban and natural, and is full of economic, social, environmental and anthropological contradictions. My project, Paisaje minado, dibujando la destrucción de otro tiempo (“Mined landscape: Drawing the destruction of another time”), sought to shed light on this complex region —iconic of twentieth-century Spain’s modern industrial development— by collecting old maps, work charts and mining diagrams from the archives of geologists, topographers and mining engineers, and then connecting them with testimonies of the men and women —with special attention to the role of female miners— who actually worked these coal deposits. The present piece constitutes a dialogue between the materials gathered during that research process, and images from the media, artworks, texts and proposals for the twenty-first century’s new ecological paradigm aimed at developing clean energies and transitioning away from fossil fuels. The presentation is formatted as a sort of Bilderatlas that invites a transversal “reading” of visual, audio and textual references in both a pdf version and a multimedia version, available here:https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vTeiW7XQ3hdAcqSVn4J_YcfzBKsMV_WHcflYAEKi1gySA-Vdnak2jsuLuQsOCD2qMoPvnOh7tteKmNA/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=60000