Two Mining Areas: Spaces of Care amid Extraction

Abstract

Malmberget (meaning ore mountain) lies in both northern Sweden and Sábme, the land of the indigenous Sámi. The mountain Erzberg (also meaning ore mountain) in Styria is part of the Austrian Alps. At its foot lies the town Eisenerz (meaning iron ore) which has provided the workforce to mine the ore. Both towns and regions have dedicated their existence to the global supply of iron ore. This paper argues that they require specific practices of care for those who lose their homes, have to adapt to the progress of extraction or stay within shrinking towns. As heroic male-centered accounts of extractive areas already exist in large numbers, I focus on following small-scale spatial practices of care and their precarities amid extraction. These insights into the complexity of simultaneous regional extraction and care contribute to current feminist-materialist discussions and thinking on architectures in areas of complex environmental change.

Keywords:

• extraction
• care
• feminist spatial practices
• feminist new materialisms

Reclaiming care is to keep it grounded in practical engagements with situated material conditions that often expose tensions. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care¹

This paper explores some of the spatial practices which follow vast large-scale extraction in two specific mining regions. I have stayed with the troubles of the areas, which are among the largest suppliers of iron ore in Europe. Malmberget (meaning ore mountain) lies in the North-Swedish part of Sábme, the land of the indigenous Sámi (Figure 1). The mountain Erzberg (also meaning ore mountain) in Styria is part of the Austrian Alps. At its foot lies the town Eisenerz (meaning iron ore) which has provided the workforce to mine the ore (Figure 2). The towns are central to traditional mining areas of iron ore and have large amounts of exhaustible resources. Both areas are quite sparsely populated, rather difficult to reach, and both towns have the highest average age in their nations because of the diminishing workforce. This is due to the further mechanization of the mining industries in Eisenerz, and the increase of underground mining and subsequent gradual disappearance of the town in Malmberget.

Figure 1 Malmberget. Photo: Karin Reisinger, 2019.

Figure 2 Erzberg Mountain with the town Eisenerz. Photo: Karin Reisinger, 2021.

My first visit to Malmberget took place in 2016 and to Erzberg two years later. My research builds on continuous research trips of various lengths in which I document spatial changes, study local archives, have conversations with local actors, and even participate in their cultural activities.² Over the years, friendships have developed. The core method is an active form of participatory observation, leading to a co-creation of knowledge together with local actors who apply spatial practices of care within the extractive areas.³ Thus, my role is often an organizational one. Furthermore, my participation in various local artistic formats such as exhibitions and other public events aims to shape alternative knowledges about the regions’ and architectures’ involvements.⁴ It is contextualized through the local experiences of actors who are less present in heroic, male-dominated mining stories. An intersectional feminist perspective is crucial, as is awareness of my positionality within centers and margins of knowledge production vis-à-vis material production.⁵

During such intense fieldwork, the simultaneity of extraction and care has been one of the most persistent findings that emerged in numerous conversations and shared cultural practices with local spatial practitioners. Extraction and care are entangled in the regions’ architectures and practices. For this mapping of care amid extraction, I understand care as a practice which “involves maintaining the world of, and meeting the needs of, ourself and others.”⁶ This definition already hints toward two dimensions of care, namely the physical architectural practice of maintenance (who takes care of the architectures of a shrinking/disappearing mining town?) and addressing the needs of locals. “Deciding to act and to take on […] unmet needs is another critical aspect of caring,” writes Joan C. Tronto in “Caring Architecture,” a chapter of the 2019 book Critical Care which has made a substantial contribution to the understanding of care in architectural practice and theory.⁷ According to Tronto, caring starts with attentiveness, with recognizing the needs of “others,” followed by responsibility, competence, and responsiveness.⁸

Interestingly, most of these “ethical elements” of care also form the focus of recent feminist new materialisms.⁹ Various thinkers of new materialisms have in recent years shed light on the effects and agencies of materials as they shape histories, environments and daily lives on various scales.¹⁰ Architectural discourse has reacted, not least because architecture is one of the biggest drivers of material consumption and global material flows.¹¹ However, it is especially remarkable how feminist new materialisms and critical materialisms have related material entanglements to various trajectories of discrimination and the search for approaches which address feminisms on a profoundly intersectional basis. Sarah E. Truman describes feminist new materialisms in her summary from 2019 as a porous field that is “influenced by feminist science and technology studies, the environmental humanities, … transgender and queer studies,” and is often linked to posthumanism or “the ontological or vital materialist turn.”¹² Following the material from an intersectional-feminist perspective demands an involved research practice sensitive to multiple (material) relationships, as Truman suggests:

Consider a phone constructed from metal, frequently mined at the expense of violent racialized human labor and Indigenous sovereign rights over land. In considering the “value” of a phone, feminist new materialist research might ask questions about the ways that humans and metal and phone and land and capitalism and economy and militarism, and so on, are already imbricated in each other. This is the politics of entanglement.¹³

Truman suggests taking one object’s material relations as a starting point and proceeding to the larger scale of the entanglement. What does this mean for the concrete regions of mineral exploitation? The effects of “public material interest” hit local, but on a large scale. They demand mountains to be mined, homes to be lost, and environments to be made uninhabitable for an unimaginably long time. However, they also demand reparative practices of care necessary in areas of extraction. Since technocratic and heroic histories of mining areas have already exposed the hard male labor, my contribution aims to direct attention to the feminist practices of care, highlighting epistemologically and ontologically submerged positions:

[S]ubmerged perspectives are anchored within social ecologies that reorganize and refute the monocultural imperative, as do I in my encounter with these other worlds. Submerged modes flurry in their activity, random, complex, and coordinated systems that are often illegible to those with state and financial power that assume simplicity where complexity actually dwells.¹⁴

This quotation is from Macarena Gómez-Barris’ ground-breaking book The Extractive Zone, which elaborates on a feminist account of extractivism and colonialism, offering an approach capable of making sense of the intersectionality at work in mining areas. Looking at local interdependencies and formations within areas of extraction, she finds decolonial practices that refuse the separation of various forms of oppression.

Malmberget

The town of Malmberget is slowly disappearing in line with the extension of the underground mine which is increasingly destabilizing the ground (Figure 1). Actually, Malmberget has three names: the Swedish Malmberget, the Sámi name Málmmavárre, and the miänkieli name Malmivaara. The structure of the community is very diverse because mining has attracted laborers from many parts of the world (and continues to do so). As the town subsides, many people move to the neighboring town of Gällivare, but many leave the area completely. The urban area which contains the two towns of Gällivare and Malmberget is wedged between two mines, the state-owned LKAB mine (North) which extracts iron ore, and the private AITIK mine (South-East) which extracts copper, gold, and silver. LKAB is a global supplier of iron ore and Sweden is the EU’s largest supplier of iron ore.¹⁵

Malmberget will disappear in the next decades. Indeed, parts of it have already vanished from the maps. The last remains of the town are split into two halves: Västra and Östra Malmberget (West and East). It is no longer possible reach one part from the other, because the former place of the connecting road, the southern part of a sinkhole over 250 meters deep called kaptensgruvan (Captain’s Pit), is the riskiest area. In 2019, the last shop closed. Due to the limited lifespan of the town of Malmberget, works of care and maintenance have been suspended. Who would invest in a non-existent future?

Since the 1950s it has been clear that the town cannot remain, but a large workforce is still needed.¹⁶ In the town’s golden era it had more than 10,000 inhabitants. To house the inhabitants, the mining company LKAB commissioned some of Sweden’s most influential architects, including Hakan Åhlberg and Folke Hederus up until the 1950s. Olof Lundgren and Eskil Sundahl also designed buildings for the community. Most of these buildings have already been dismantled. Areas are fenced off and buildings behind the fences are being taken down. The current architectural practice is one of un-building and constant adaptation, leading to difficult situations such as homes being lost. The global material connections of supply with iron ore have grown historically;¹⁷ as the price of iron ore changes, the speed of the town’s demolition is regularly re-considered.¹⁸

This tremendous loss also concerns the indigenous Sámi who lose more and more spaces, with negative impacts on reindeer herding. In addition to the loss of places, the large infrastructure of mining complicates various of their practices and leads to the area’s prolonged coloniality.¹⁹ Despite all of these losses, tons of material continue to be exploited, processed, and transported for the “greater interest” in material that enables us to build, read, write, communicate, and much more (this paper is written on a laptop which functions due to the use of minerals extracted from various parts of the world).

My first contact with the community was in 2016. The exhibition “Dokumentera Malmberget” exhibited Tords Pettersson’s large model which filled the entire sportshall of Malmberget. Each house was photographed and the photographs were hung around the model in the middle of the room. Works by local artists completed the documentation, and videos in a small room upstairs, collected by Gunilla Tagestam, showed women’s lives in Malmberget.²⁰ These urgent local historiographies did not wait for professional institutionalized histories; instead, the inhabitants took matters into their own hands, and exhibited and published their own photographs.²¹ I was impressed by my first visit to the exhibition and became interested in learning from local practitioners who deal with the changing environments of exploitation. I wanted to learn which architectural infrastructures facilitate these works of caring for what is lost, through documentation and other ways of “doing heritage.”

In Malmberget, feminist histories go back a long way. The kvinnoklubben (Women’s Club) was active from 1900, initially as the kvinnoförening (Women’s Association) engaging in the coming societal and urban transformations caused by extraction. Their activism also promoted the women’s housing program from 1933. This was predominantly concerned with the demands for housing for workers and their families: water toilets, electric lighting, wardrobes, adequate space for families, access to laundry rooms, etc.²²

In the disappearing town, two recent examples illustrate how the unmet needs that emerge from living with the loss have been approached by cultural practices. The first was a “farewell festival” called FARVÄL FOCUS, organized for the only high-rise building in Malmberget, called focus huset. It was organized and curated by Pernilla Fagerlönn in 2019. It exhibited the work of local artists in the flats on the eleventh floor of the building as well as in some of the forlorn shops at the ground level of the building complex. Erik Homstedt’s photographs were among the exhibits. The photographer has documented the steady adaptations of the urban environment since the 1950s.²³ Many young artists from the area also contributed art works. The writer David Väyrynen put his daily experiences and thoughts, together with those of the festival organizers, artists and visitors, into writing on the walls of a flat (Figure 3). Miriam Vikman showed paintings of the facades of houses, especially their colors, before they were dismantled. Fagerlönn’s participatory sculpture displayed emotions about the town soon to disappear. And I myself was invited to bring the archival material from the collections of ArkDes about Malmberget back to Malmberget in a walking seminar as part of the festival.

Figure 3 David Väyrynen’s contribution to the FARVÄL FOCUS Festival, Malmberget, 2019, curated by Pernilla Fagerlönn. Title: “There Was Something that Exists No Longer.” Kaptensgruvan is visible from the room on the eleventh floor of the focus huset. Photo: Pernilla Fagerlönn, 2019.

A second initiative which meets the needs of the town is the Embroidery Café founded by Karina Jarrett. In regular meetings, Jarrett, Margit Anttila, Berit Backe, Carina Engelmark, Eeva Linder, and Christine Madsén came together to embroider and exchange stories about their daily lives. They also created an archive of their perspectives on Malmberget’s disappearance by documenting the urban and industrial changes in their embroideries. In this way, they preserved now lost architectures (Figure 4). Both the farewell festival and the local embroidery group involve practices that gather literacies of survival, mourning and dealing with loss.

Figure 4 Karina Jarrett. “Av järn är du kommen” [From Ore You are Made], embroidery showing the transformation of Malmberget, 2019. Photo: Karin Reisinger.

Erzberg

Erzberg lies in the Austrian Alps. The mountain has been scraped into a shape reminiscent of a pyramid (Figure 2). The community is shrinking because fewer and fewer workers are needed. Literally translated, Erzberg means “ore mountain” and Eisenerz, the name of the town means “iron ore.” Extraction of ore, which started before the eleventh century, has been central to the region for a very long time. However, today in Eisenerz, especially in the center of the town with its buildings dating back to the sixteenth century, a noticeable number of buildings have been abandoned. Due to the steady expansion of the mining area, single farms and smaller properties have had to make way, bit by bit. Houses have had to be demolished for the greater interest of ore extraction. The village of Wismath, built to enable workers to live closer to their workplaces, has suffered the same fate. In 1921 more than 1,700 inhabitants lived there.²⁴ Due to the progress of the mountain’s exploitation, the village has now been dismantled, first of all by making access to it harder and harder. Much material has been exploited since then and the surface of the mountain has been constantly re-shaped.

Material is lifted from the deep, exploited, and dumped in places which are altered and made unrecognizable through huge volumes of waste rock. After the iron ore is extracted from the mineral, the remaining mass is stored elsewhere, sometimes with the argument that it improves the accessibility of the valley from the mountain pass. A mass of dumped rock might, for example, replace the bridge that was previously necessary to reach the valley. This results in peculiar situations on the ground. At the end of Gsollstraße, “Gsoll Street,” masses of rock have been heaped up over a long time. Slowly, the first trees have started to reclaim the rock. On a human scale, this means standing in front of a prohibition sign where the street ends suddenly because it is blocked by the waste material and tentative greenery.

A book chapter by Ilse Wieser from 1984 sheds light on what she calls the “materialization” of “girls” during their education to serve the mine by serving the (male) miners. Focusing on daily domestic situations, Wieser describes how the married woman is not granted her right to justice, and how women need to deal with conflict in order to satisfy the hard-working miners. Even in times of economic crisis, responsibility for malnutrition, among other things, was seen to lie with mothers who were accused of being “bad housewives.”²⁵ In this way, the private sphere was made a matter of public intrusion through health and domestic education. Hidden herstories show that women also worked in the mine, under difficult conditions, for example sorting grades of stone; they were the first ones to be replaced by machines. The historian Karin Hojak-Talaber works on capturing and making visible the labor of female miners in the Erzberg.²⁶ Her exhibition “Wir Klauberinnen” at the gallery FreiRaum in Eisenerz in 2021-2022 included numerous events bringing local actors together to discuss and collect their knowledge (Figure 5).

Figure 5 Detail from Karin Hojak-Talaber’s exhibition “Wir Klauberinnen” in Eisenerz, 2021-22. The local audience contributed names when they recognized somebody in the photographs of women who had worked in the mine. Photo: Karin Reisinger, 2021. The historical photograph is from the private archive of Christa Kolb whose mother worked in the mine.

Precarious Spaces for Coming Together

The vastly shrinking demand for workers has led to the highest average age of inhabitants in both towns relative to their country as a whole. In Erzberg, the town is shrinking; Malmberget is disappearing, but the situation has created a high demand for workers’ homes in the neighboring town of Gällivare. The situations have led to difficult economic situations for both communities and it is important to remember that mining itself is based on finite resources. Within these difficult regional situations, practices of cultural care are capable of producing new perspectives and creating spaces for coming together.

“Connectedness through care can counteract, and as is my hope, overcome the toxic devaluation of nature, craft and reproductive labor,” Elke Krasny, one of the editors of Critical Care, underlines in her chapter “Architecture and Care.”²⁷ Care is also a “form of spatial production,” as Kim Trogal sets out in The Social (Re)Production of Architecture, a book which has been influential in the discussion of spatial practices from a feminist angle. According to Trogal, care includes geopolitical perspectives; care, space, and architecture are connected in many complex ways and on various scales, with interdependencies reaching across the planet.²⁸ In “Caring Architecture,” Joan Tronto outlines questions of care that concern architecture, such as who maintains and repairs buildings, what or who is displaced or housed, where building materials are taken from, and who will care in the future:

Here is where a feminist-inspired, relational, critical care approach begins to change our perspective entirely. Rather than thinking of buildings as things, thinking of them in relationships – with ongoing environments, people, flora and fauna – that exist through time as well as in space, changes the approach fundamentally.²⁹

Trogal, Tronto and Krasny show care as a generative practice, a “form of spatial production” affecting spaces from the geopolitical to much smaller scales, which my observations underline.³⁰ Cultural practices of care of take place in specific architectures and bring forth specific architectures. However, how does this “thinking in relationships” and bringing connectedness and interdependency to the fore contribute to understanding the regions in which care and extraction happen simultaneously?³¹

In both towns, the absence of care in the form of the maintenance of architectures is highly visible. Eisenerz is shrinking and therefore it is difficult to maintain all of the buildings, with many of them under preservation. In Malmberget, the buildings are dismantled. Who would take care of the buildings when they are going to be dismantled anyway? At the same time, practices of care address people’s loss and use the opportunities of empty architectures to create spaces for coming together and taking care of memories for future communities. However, often these architectures only host practices of care for a limited period of time. In both towns, the precarity is obvious and pressing.

Focus huset, for which Pernilla Fagerlönn curated the “farewell festival” in 2019, was dismantled in 2021 after a delay because the building could not be blasted. The empty space left behind is waiting for a sculpture to be installed, a different form of remembrance. The extraordinary and generous town library, which housed a show of the Luleå Biennial in 2020, was then emptied out and dismantled in 2022. Kåkstaden, replicas of the oldest houses of the first settlements in the town, were built very near to the mine. During the winter of 2021-22 the community bid farewell to these with a final Christmas market. The local sportshall is still operative and houses public sports events adjacent to areas fenced off to the north and to the east. However, one by one, the buildings used for cultural moments of community to grieve the transition onsite are being lost while the town is dismantled (Figure 6).

Figure 6 Malmberget’s architectures serve as infrastructure for cultural practices of care for a limited time (see hatched areas on satellite image), wedged between growing areas of extraction; the sportshall; Tord Pettersson’s model of the town; focus huset and the banner announcing the festival; the library; the building which stored the model for some time; a building of kåkstaden. Collage and photos: Karin Reisinger, 2022. Background image: Google maps © 2023 CNES/Airbus, Landsat/Copernicus, Lantmäteriet/Metria, Maxar Technologies.

In Eisenerz, the local museum and the local library facilitate the town’s remarkable knowledge production and serve as a hub for diversifying local histories. The same can be said about Gerhild Illmeier’s gallery FreiRaum, a space for regular exhibitions and also a place for coming together.³² In 2021-22 it housed Karin Hojak-Talaber’s exhibition “Wir Klauberinnen” about women working in mining (Figure 5). The number of abandoned buildings in the town also creates the potential for intermediary cultural interventions, such as the Rostfest Festival which utilized and enriched the town before the Covid crisis with concerts and artistic interventions as well as discursive events.³³ Cultural production is clearly very intense in Eisenerz, albeit with more permanent facilities than in Malmberget.

In towns of extraction such as these, practices of care are important because they keep the communities active and together even as they shrink, which for many inhabitants means a process of grieving and mourning. The large-scale transformations for extractivism are therefore accompanied by many small-scale activities. Both forces, extraction and care, with their spatial outcomes, act simultaneously in the region in a complex interdependency, and have worked simultaneously over the years. Mining and care are not obvious regional focuses to connect, but the engagement with my case studies has shown that extractive practices produce an especially high demand for reparative activities.³⁴

Tensions and Futurities: The Literacies of Embroidering, Collecting and Organizing

[T]he question of “who is caring for who?” is part of a spatial dynamics at multiple scales, from global, regional, in neighbourhoods, in our homes to the scale of microscopic organisms. The spatial dynamics of care are part of what is usually called the geography of uneven development, or reductively put, in our current mode of development, we only have advancement or “progress” in one place, at the expense of others in other places.³⁵

Kim Trogal brings together the multiple scales of care with the important question of unevenness and continues to explain that various (transgressions of) dichotomies form the background for activities of care. After a long pause due to Covid-19, I revisited Malmberget in October 2021. Seventy-three percent of the buildings of Eastern Malmberget had already been taken away. Streets were partly deconstructed, partly left to lead through a landscape of gardens without houses. Traces of some houses remained as piles of furniture and wooden frames, overgrown by their gardens. The piles also revealed the materials of the former architecture. On the building sites, steel and iron are extracted using industrial lifting magnets.

The practices I have looked at and participated in address issues on small scales and react to their environments in ways based on direct and immediate needs. The examples are determined by the risks of “individualising structural responsibilities” following “neoliberalism’s privatization of care,” which, as Helen Runting points out, complicates the notions of care.³⁶ To strengthen the critical involvement of the current discussion of care in architectural discourse, I have also sought to borrow arguments from the discussion of health care issues. The sociologist Christa Wichterich underlines such concerns in health care by looking at “care extractivism.” She studies the way in which care is often associated with familiarization and voluntarism, on the one hand, while on the other it is subject to professionalization, efficiency, and discipline.³⁷ “Care gets trapped in a contradiction between professionalism and affection, closeness and distance, private and public.”³⁸ The relational entanglement also implies “moral bonds, emotions and attentiveness” that result in fluid “boundaries between paid and unpaid.”³⁹ All of these are important concerns, and are mirrored in the examples of this paper, in which the actors often oscillate between voluntarism and professionalization. There is a reliable ambivalence when thinking about care.⁴⁰ My research has shown that, in the tensions of extractive spaces, local practitioners have to develop extraordinary competences for resistance and looking ahead in response to local needs, as Wichterich and Runting have elaborated when deconstructing the dichotomies of care and extraction. “Care is not one way; the cared for co-forms the carer too,” Maria Puig de la Bellacasa tells us, further complexifying the relationships in her book Matters of Care, as she notes the importance of looking into caring practices in a world that is under multiple pressures.⁴¹

In towns which lack visions of the future beyond extraction, the work of the local practitioners introduced in this article shows practices of care in relation to the dominant and large-scale practices which lead to profit for most of us, but to loss and sadness for many locals. The practitioners introduced here offer post-extractive imaginaries of hope. But how can practices of care, maintenance, and reproduction become acknowledged future visions for these regions which are so desperately in need of new forms of identification, when they are dealing with the finiteness of resources and their own limited time-spans? In thinking through this question, my role of organizing knowledges comes in – not only in this text, but also in shared lectures and panels at universities, as well as locally, to foster exchange between the feminist practitioners of the towns, academia and the general public.⁴² This gathering and sharing of local knowledges of care works against the neoliberal tactics of individualization and fragmentation. By using such strategies, I aim to make small contributions to supporting the growing structures and formations among local practitioners.

Following the material flows of iron ore back to the sites of extraction and adopting Truman’s suggestion of considering entanglements, I came to practices of care which are acted out in specific spaces and architectures: museums, spaces to meet and work together, spaces which can be altered for the function of caring for a community in need, albeit often with the harsh reality of impermanence determined by the progress of extraction. Small-scale practices have to organize, rely on unpaid work, improvise, and respond to needs without any protocols. They come together despite the capitalist fragmentation.⁴³ Their visions foster maintenance, reproduction, and care as responses to exploitation and destruction, and thus offer opportunities of resistance for futurities yet unthought.

Within these communities, which are subject to large-scale changes including expanding fields of extraction of iron ore, climate change, and remodulations of the global resource supply chain, the architectures are sometimes as precarious as the cultural practices of care. Under these pressures the practitioners bring together their competencies to create unique spaces and strategies for preserving memories of their environments and cultures; most poignantly, this often happens during the very process, the long-extended moment, of their being lost to extraction. Learning from the literacies of embroidering women, the assemblages of local historians, and artists and curators who bid farewell to architectures before they are dismantled seems a critical and timely task. Not only does it help us better understand the relationship of architectures, regions and cultural spatial practices locked into this situation of simultaneous extraction and care, it shifts the paradigm away from more conventional understandings of collective memorialization in built environment studies in our current moment of transformation.

Acknowledgments

I am very thankful to the local practitioners whose work is described here for their ongoing friendship and the generous sharing of their practices, as well as for the time they gave to discuss their representation in this text.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), project no. T1157-G. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright license to any author accepted manuscript version arising from this submission.

Notes on contributors

Karin Reisinger

Karin Reisinger is a researcher and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Institute for Education in the Arts) where she leads the two research projects “Two Ore Mountains: Feminist Ecologies of Spatial Practices” and “Stories of Post-extractive Feminist Futures.” She also teaches the PhD course “Approaching Research Practice in Architecture” (TU Munich). Her feminist research focuses on the mining towns of Malmberget in Sábme/Sweden and Eisenerz in Austria and their situated knowledges. In 2016 Karin co-organized the AHRA conference ‘‘Architecture & Feminisms’’ during her post-doctoral fellowship at the School of Architecture in KTH Stockholm, and co-edited two of the publications that arose from the conference, Architecture and Culture 5(3) and field 7(1).

Notes

1. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 11.

2. I stopped counting the research visits, but they exceeded twelve to Malmberget and ten to Erzberg over several years, yet they were inconsistent due to difficulties caused by the pandemic.

3. Pernilla Fagerlönn and Karin Reisinger, “Malmberget Dialogue” and “Malmberget Dialogue 2021” (Lectures, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, November 3, 2020 and November 5, 2021); Karina Jarrett and Karin Reisinger, “Broderi som respons på förlust och sorg,” Täcklebo Broderiakademi 3-4 (2021): 26-29; Karin Reisinger and Karina Jarrett, video, “Karina Jarrett on the Embroidery Café: In Conversation with Karin Reisinger” (Vienna, 2021). The video shows a conversation with Karina Jarrett about the cultural practice of embroidery in a specific context. Available online: https://repository.akbild.ac.at/de/alle_inhalte/query;fq=%7B%22fulltext%22:%5B%22Reisinger%22%5D%7D;st=0;sz=50/25728. In 2022 I organized the panel “Curatorial Threads – Connecting Situated Knowledges in the Face of Extraction” at the Vetenskapsrådet conference of artistic research with the title “Transformations” on November 16. The contributors were Karina Jarrett, Pernilla Fagerlönn, and Jelena Micić.

4. For example, I gave a participatory lecture at the Folketshus Gällivare about the disappearing architectures of Malmberget and how they are represented in architectural archives (2019). I also contributed to the festival FARVÄL FOCUS with a walking seminar (2019). In 2022 I organized the event “Extraction and Care” at the Rostfest in Eisenerz, where Pernilla Fagerlönn reported from Malmberget. Available online: https://www.rostfest.at/artists/extraction-and-care-curating-ore-mountains/.

5. See Karin Reisinger, “Struggles at the ‘Peripheries’: Situated Knowledge Production and Feminist Visions for Post-extractive Environments,” Cidades Autumn Special Issue (2022): 66–76. The paper addresses ethical issues concerning positionality.

6. Maureen Sander-Staudt in an extensive overview of the discussion of care, “Care Ethics,” in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online: https://iep.utm.edu/care-ethics/ (accessed December 1, 2022).

7. Joan C. Tronto, “Caring Architecture,” in Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, eds. Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2019), 31.

8. See also Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York and London: Routledge, 1993).

9. Ibid., 127. See also Sarah E. Truman, “Feminist New Materialisms,” in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Research Methods, eds. P.A. Atkinson, S. Delamont, M.A. Hardy, and M. Williams (London: Sage, 2019); Petra Lilja and Karin Reisinger, “sensing interdependency, experiencing embeddedness, extending the frame while zooming in,” Proceedings of Politics of the Machines – Rogue Research 2021, September 2021. Available online: https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/POM2021.10.

10. See, among others, Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010); New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, eds. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010); New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, eds. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012); Samantha Frost, “The Implications of the New Materialisms for Feminist Epistemology,” in Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge, ed. H. E. Grasswick (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 69-83.

11. Katie Lloyd Thomas’s publication Material Matters (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2007) took on this topic very early on and Lloyd Thomas has continued it in her recent research; see also Jane Rendell, “Silver,” in Lost Rocks, eds. Justy Phillips and Margaret Woodward (Hobart: A Published Event, 2017); and Hélène Frichot, Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). These are important and influential examples for the development of feminist-materialist discussions in architecture.

12. Truman, “Feminist New Materialisms.”

13. Ibid.

14. Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2017), xvi.

15. LKAB, “Geographic Market.” Available online: https://www.lkab.com/en/about-lkab/lkab-in-brief/geographic-market/ (accessed April 29, 2022).

16. Reisinger and Jarrett, “Karina Jarrett on the Embroidery Café.”

17. Gösta Forsström, Malmberget: malmbrytning och bebyggelse (Luleå: Norrbottens Museum, 1973).

18. Sverker Sörlin, “I Malmberget har vanan ingen makt: Några tankar om mångtydighet och uppbrott med anledning av Erik Holmstedts fotografier,” in Inte längre mitt hem, eds. Erik Holmstedt and Sverker Sörlin (Luleå: Black Island Books, 2008), 49-57.

19. Notions of the area’s colonization cannot be fully explored in this paper although there is certainly a relationship to material connections. See May-Britt Öhman, “Gut la dån? Vem är du? Kukas sie olet? – Who Are You? An Alternative Perspective on the History of the North,” in Kiruna Forever, edited by Daniel Golling and Carlos Minguez Carrasco, 237-46 (Stockholm: ArkDes, 2021); Åsa Össbo, Nya vatten, dunkla speglingar: Industriell kolonialism genom svensk vattenkraftutbyggnad in renskötselområdet 1910–1968 (Umeå: Umeå University, 2014); Kristina Sehlin MacNeil, Extractive Violence on Indigenous Country: Sami and Aboriginal Views and Conflicts and Power Relations with Extractive Industries (Umeå: Umeå University, 2017). For my account see Karin Reisinger, “Doing Material Positionality While Listening to the Prolonged Coloniality of a Mining Town on Indigenous Ground,” in Architectures of Colonialism: Constructed Histories, Conflicting Memories, eds. Vera Egbers, Christa Kamleithner, Özge Sezer, Alexandra Skedzuhn-Safir, and Albrecht Wiesener (Basel: Birkhäuser, forthcoming).

20. Gunilla Tagestam, Med malmen under våra fötter – kvinnor i Malmberget berättar (Malmberget: Dokumentera Malmberget, 2016).

21. For example, Gellivare bildarkiv/Leif Pääjärvi, Vid kanten av “gropen” (Gällivare / Malmberget, Self-publication, 2015) assembles historic photos of demolished houses.

22. Malmbergets socialdemokratiska kvinnoklubb, Malmbergets kvinnoklubb 1933-1987 (Malmberget, 1987), especially 10.

23. Erik Holmstedt. Available online: https://www.holmstedt.nu (accessed April 29, 2022).

24. Sigrid Günther, “Die letzten Bewohner auf dem Steirischen Erzberg,” in Eisenerz: Ein heimatgeschichtliches Lesebuch, ed. Stadtgemeinde Eisenerz (Eisenerz: Self-publication, 2018), especially 221.

25. Ilse Wieser, “Die Formung der Hausfrau am Beispiel der Eisenerzer Hauswirtschaftsschule,” in Bergmann oder Werkssoldat: Eisenerz als Fallbeispiel industrieller Politik, ed. Gesellschaft zur Förderung Interdisziplinärer Forschung (Graz: Edition Werner Strahalm, 1984), 95-120.

26. Karin Hojak-Talaber, Rund um den Erzberg: Die beeindruckende Geschichte der Klauberfrauen (Erfurt: Sutton Verlag, 2021).

27. Elke Krasny, “Architecture and Care,” in Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, eds. Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2019), 40.

28. Kim Trogal, “Caring: Making Commons, Making Connections,” in The Social (Re)Production of Architecture: Politics, Values and Actions in Contemporary Practice, eds. Doina Petrescu and Kim Trogal (London: Routledge, 2016), 159.

29. Tronto, “Caring Architecture,” 28.

30. Trogal, “Caring: Making Commons, Making Connections,” 159.

31. “The basis for feminist care ethics is connectedness and interdependency,” Krasny in “Architecture and Care,” 37.

32. eisenerZ*ART. Available online: https://www.eisenerz-art.at (accessed May 15, 2022).

33. Rostfest. Available online: https://rostfest.at (accessed April 29, 2022).

34. Mining companies, as long as they have been dependent on human labor, have been very aware of the need for care and have invested in the communities. However, these activities are not the focus of this text.

35. Trogal, “Caring: Making Commons, Making Connections,” 160.

36. Helen Runting, “Review of Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, edited by Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny,” in The Journal of Architecture, vol. 26, no. 4 (2021): 559–565.

37. Christa Wichterich, “Who Cares about Healthcare Workers? Care Extractivism and Care Struggles in Germany and India,” Social Change 50, no. 1 (2020): 125-28.

38. Ibid., 126.

39. Christa Wichterich, Care Extractivism and the Reconfiguration of Social Reproduction in Post-Fordist Economies (Kassel: Kassel University Press, 2019), 8; Wichterich, “Who Cares about Healthcare Workers?”, 126. See also Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

40. See also Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care, 220.

41. Ibid., 219.

42. See footnotes 3 and 4.

43. Wichterich localizes fragmentation within health care work in “Who Cares about Healthcare Workers?”, 129.