Affective atmospheres of absence: Working on the coal mine

Abstract

What is an affective atmosphere of absence? How can the sense of loss be felt in place? The Pike River Coal Mine, on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island, is suffused with trauma and absence. In November 2010, 29 men became entombed in the mine and their bodies remain there. Amidst the unfolding revelations of the culpability of the mine’s management and a shocking narrative of events, the mine has not been re-entered. The potential for re-entering the mine is controversial and has become politicised. All of this is set within one of the country’s most sublime landscapes, with lush rainforest, dripping, moist, tranquil – emphatically atmospheric. Images of the blast that killed the men (shown as a powerful rush of air and debris on the camera monitoring the mine’s portal) and the beauty of the surrounding landscape are intensely affective, a palpable expression of Et In Arcadia Ego, death’s presence an estranging force. One cannot be ‘at one’ with this place. The grief of the families, including one film which shows them shouting their loved one’s names into the mine as an anniversary ritual, is still raw. My role in responding to this site is a landscape architect and academic, drawing on my ongoing research on memory and melancholy. This paper will explore the estranged landscape of the coal mine, and what it is to work on this site, with its beauty, its mourning, its political sensitivity.