Juan Guillermo Dumay
Ruth Oldham
Driving through the Bassin Minier
Keeping in mind the issues raised by the 1970s land art movement, I would like to look at the landscape of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais area of northern France, which has been deep-mined for coal for nearly three centuries. Disruption to the surface of the land has been minimal compared to an open pit mine such as Bingham Canyon, where the mine has displaced all other land uses, even engulfing the original town of Bingham. In the Nord-Pas-de-Calais some of the now abandoned underground mines have manifested themselves at ground level in the form of subsidence lakes, but the most obvious impact to the topography has been the creation of hundreds of spoil heaps, known as terrils in French, from terre (earth). There are over 300 of these small hills of dark grey rocky waste dotted across a strip of land about 12 miles wide that stretches 120 miles east to west. Their conical silhouettes have created a strong visual identity to this otherwise flat and uneventful part of northern France (fig.2). The mines supported a workforce of thousands and attracted immigrants from all over France and Europe. These new arrivals were housed in exemplary workers’ housing estates with schools,
churches and other community facilities, all provided by the mining companies. A network of railway lines was created to transport the coal. The last mine closed in 1990, concluding a slow decline that began in the 1960s. In 2012 the entire area was classed as a UNESCO world heritage site, considered to be a complete landscape bearing witness to the coal mining industry which in turn was a crucial element of the European Industrial Revolution. In all 353 elements (such as pit head machinery, housing estates, schools, railways and terrils) have been listed. They recount many aspects of the rich social and economic history of the area, from the paternalistic management techniques of the mining companies to the workers’ union movement and the struggle for improved conditions and rights. Interestingly, in the inventory of the UNESCO listing, the terrils (of which 51 are listed) come third, ahead of housing and social amenities. The inadvertent results that mining had on the landscape have been recognised as important as the infrastructure that enabled it.
46
extraction. Has there been much work on natural process land reclamation? this seems like a planned alternative to the filling and regrading that we’d normally associate with greenscaping, something like planting sections of a former industrial landscape in such a way that canopy, root structure, and growth patterns change the form of the landscape over a long period of time, gradually transforming it into something that is neither a simulacra of a pre-industrial natural state nor a preserved form of post-industrial conditions.
M H: I remember visiting a friend in Kazakhstan, who grew up in a uranium mining town... the abandoned terrils were her childhood playground, with ready-made bike routes to circle up and down on. I remember hiking in North England, where the trail took us through rolling green sheep pastures with overgrown moss that concealed the entrances to abandoned coal mines. I think there is a lot of magic in post- industrial landscapes. i’m thinking about the different kinds of reclamation suggested here: local residents,
M T: I love the idea of a ‘complete landscape’. The landscape was a product of the industrial revolution and it need not be restored. It just is. A new normal I guess. missing in the latter? Do artists working on land reclamation have a role in bridging these two bodies of users/stakeholders? ‘regular people’, ad-hoc reclaiming the abandoned mine so that it becomes part of their imagination and daily lives, a ‘cultural artefact’, versus the reclamation and re-greening executed by larger public or private institutions. what is
R J: I like the reflection on landscape and industry and the way this explores the origins of the forms that we characterize and cultivate as natural, as well as the argument against greenscaping as an always necessary solution to the effects of resource in this case to northern France, of a ponderous American attitude to nature and landscape that cannot admit man-made change. Ruth points out that there is no going back to a pre-industrial landscape, that is unrecoverable and mythic at most.
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator