Memorialisation and its denial: slow resistance through derealisation in Kiruna, Sweden

ABSTRACT

This paper demonstrates the role that Judith Butler’s concept of derealisation has to play in the analysis of slow and structural violence within extractivism. I deploy derealisation to examine the denial of public mourning and memorialisation of the evacuated and ruined former city centre of Kiruna, Sweden, by the mining company LKAB. Kiruna is home to the largest underground iron-ore mine in the world. The ore-body extends over two kilometres directly below Kiruna. As a result of ongoing mining practices threatening the stability of the city, Kiruna is currently in the process of a 20-year resettlement. By contrasting the roles of enforced silence and silence as a means of creating a collective, often counter-hegemonic narrative, I highlight the bifurcated roles silence plays in Kiruna, speaking to the simultaneity of structural violence and the emergence of resistance as slow. Resistance here is argued to be emergent in the desire for my informants to collectively memorialise the ruination of the Deformation Zone, the former city centre now owned by LKAB. The fieldwork for this research was conducted ethnographically in Kiruna between September 2020 and August 2021, using semi- and un-structured interviews and an abductive approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Derealisation
• memorialisation
• extractivism
• social change
• resistance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. However, it is worth noting that business administration scholar Chelsey Jo Huisman (2021) describes the design of the new city chambers (Kristallen) as a memorial device itself for the former city chambers. Yet, as my informant Second Gravedigger told me about the new city chambers, ‘You have to take your boots off when you go in! They have not designed the floor properly, so you cannot go in there with your winter boots on! This is not like the old city chambers at all, it doesn’t feel like you can just walk in from outside and say “hej” and meet people there. That was the feeling in the old place’.

2. Gruvstadparken is a park that inhabits the hinterland between Kiruna and the mine. Conceived in 2011 as a means for replacing demolished or relocated buildings with a public space, the park also operates as a way to bare witness to the encroaching the subsiding ground deformations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [00].

Notes on contributors

Eric Boyd

Eric Boyd holds a PhD in social anthropology specialising in extractivism in the Scandinavian arctic. He is a member of the Power and Resistance Research Group at the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg and the interdisciplinary research group Durham Arctic at Durham University.