Speculations on Making (Inverted) Mountains
By Natalie P. Koerner
Visit to Malartic Goldmine
The mine was impressive and exhausting. It took me a while to figure out why it was exhausting, considering that we were being chauffeured across the site in a school bus and only got off to take photos. I think it was exhausting because the scale was so epic and alien. The caterpillar wheels were four metres in diameter. These gigantic machines looked very small at the bottom of the open pit. They seemed to be moving slowly and according to an externally superimposed choreography – which is true, they are run by a computer program in the offices, invisible from the mine pit. I imagined that screen while I was looking down at the pit: 27 caterpillar dots wandering across the pit-representation. On the screen everything is divided into 10 x 10 x 10 cubic metre squares that contain the holy orebody. When the caterpillars arrive at a site of exploded rock pieces, the drivers see on their screens if this is waste rock or orebody rock. This is how they know if they need to drive to the waste rock site or the orebody site once the rocks have been heaped onto their loading ramp.
You can’t speed up this process, it is fully optimized and I guess you just follow a little arrow on a map on a screen inside the caterpillar driver’s cubicle. You’ll see if other caterpillars are coming your way on the screen before you see them appear, slowly and yellow and pretty majestically, from behind a grey rock mound.
I looked at the mounds of excavated rock, the plateaus of even, grey, scattered rock, the endless views across huge water basins that resemble marshlands or the site of ebb, of pre-tsunami, pre-epic-arrival. Because of the superhuman, supra -human scale, I thought of Gods and the mountainous architectures that have been built for them. I remembered a hungry and hung-over visit to Teotihuacan, the pyramids close to Mexico City, under a relentless sun. The open mine pit, gentler and cooler, looks a lot like an inversion of Teotihuacan: of its stepped slopes, steep angles, its homogenous stone volumes. When the Aztecs found the abandoned ruins of Teotihuacan in the 1300s, the named it “the place where men become gods.” Charles Lyell, an important figure in the establishment of geology as a science, understood the planet as archive and archivist of its own geological history. If gods are those who change this history, who change time itself, by rearranging layers of ancient rock, extracting gold—a substance that probably originated in some non-historical time when two stars star-crashed into each other1 — then the operators of the caterpillars are gods and the builders of Teotihuacan were too. At one point, there was a lot of gold in the pyramids that wasn’t there— amongst those rocks—before. Scientists also found large amounts of mica (a shiny mineral) that may or may not have come from Brazil. Like gold, it can’t be carbon-dated. These substances are atemporal, ahistorical. Extracting gold from its mountain-safe means changing the planet’s archival order. World ordering is world othering. In Donna Haraway’s words: “It matters what worlds world worlds.”2
Speculative Architecture
Today we looked at speculative architecture – Bucky Fuller’s Dome and Habitat 65. It made me speculate: What if the builders of Teotihuacan would have had 27 Caterpillar 793F. Unlike the builders of Malartic Mine,3 I think they would not have tried to make the world look as if they, the builders of the pyramids of the sun and the moon and the avenue of the dead had not existed. Instead, I think they would have gone for maximum impact, restructuring the geology of their surroundings in a way that would seem outrageous to us, the preservers of the status quo, the nostalgic lamenters of a pure, pre-anthropogenic past.
1 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/neutron-star-collision-gravitational-waves-gold-metal-precious-ligo-a8003146.html
2 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 35.
3 We were all struck by the mine operators’ ultimate goal to, with the mine’s closure, “mimic the original natural state”.