Emmanuelle Roth and Gregg Mitman: Visual Tailings: Excess and Nostalgia in the Mining of Mount Nimba, Liberia
Lecture abstract
Visual Tailings: Excess and Nostalgia in the Mining of Mount Nimba, Liberia
During the era of high modernism, industrial firms produced a flurry of photographs, films, drawings, and paintings, regarded by their makers as testaments to the power of science and industry in transforming the natural world for the benefit of humankind. The Liberian-American-Swedish Minerals Company (LAMCO), which, in 1963, began extracting iron ore from Mount Nimba in the northern reaches of Liberia, was no exception. But the eating of Mount Nimba also generated, like the physical tailings of the mine, an excess of visual “waste” not so easily contained in a company’s effort to carefully curate its past. Thousands of pictures, stored in drawers or shared on the web by the children of LAMCO’s Swedish and Liberian employees, make for unruly remains.
In this talk, we develop the concept of “visual tailings,” tracing this visual excess of a mine to the sites they connect, to people and places that reanimate them, and to meanings multiplied by our own method of tracing. The affective relations and socialities that come to life through the circulation of polaroids, home movies, and other visual matter born of industrial extraction fuel memories of the past, critiques of the present, and future hopes and dreams. They hold power beyond the reach of corporate technopolitics. And the affects and socialities they generate mutate at different speeds and with different repercussions in Sweden and Liberia.
About the lecturers
Emmanuelle Roth is an anthropologist and a postdoctoral research fellow in the ERC-funded project “Fragments of the Forest” (2021–2026), based at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU. Her book, Echoes of Ebola: Virus Hunters and the Making of Insecurity in Guinea is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.
Gregg Mitman is ERC professor at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU, where he leads the ERC-funded project “Fragments of the Forest.” He is also Emeritus Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His latest book, Empire of Rubber: Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia, was published by The New Press in 2021.