An affective absence: Memorialising loss at Pike River Mine, New Zealand

Abstract

Pike River Mine was an ordinary, everyday workplace, unremarkable, pragmatic, an industrial aesthetic inserted into a pristine landscape. Following an explosion in November 2010, 29 men became entombed in the mine and their bodies remain there. Unfolding revelations of the culpability of the mine's management and a shocking narrative of events left the mine suspended in time. As a crime scene, it remained sealed off until mid-2019, when the process of re-entry began. All of this is set within one of the country's most sublime landscapes, with lush rainforest, dripping, moist, tranquil. The living and the dead continue to communicate, families shouting names into the portal, Mines Rescue leaving a note for the dead men to read, and out of the mine flows the water that has crossed their bodies. The dead, the living, the mine, the forest, and the deep history of Māori, coalesce in the affective landscape of Pike River. This paper explores affectivity in the context of co-designing a memorial landscape with the dead men's families, local Māori, and the Department of Conservation.