Toxic collectives of the mining territory

Abstract

In 1936, Johannesburg hosted an Empire Exhibition, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand. The jubilee event was marked by a grand ceremony, which included a procession of half-naked black men, dragging representations of gold extracted from the underground mines.1 The development of Johannesburg’s landscape, since the discovery of gold in 1886, has been defined by forces of modernisation, and an ethic of extraction. From the city’s earliest inception as a mining camp, prospectors have gathered around this site of extortion - both of faceless human labour, and of minerals from below the surface of the earth. This design-research project traces two simultanteous, overlapping investigations. At one level, it investigates the ways in which these extractive relationships make and remake themselves, defining oppressive terms of domination - of people and the landscape - and resulting in the emergence of intertwined human and environmental conditions of toxicity. Having established the terms and mechanisms on which these dualist relations are predicated, the project proposes a radical, speculative alternative in which human and nonhuman, living and nonliving subjectivities are afforded a voice and sense of agency in this environment. Within this process lies a second aspect of investigation - one that explores the epistemologically and ontologically generative nature of design. I review the ways in which design has been mobilised as a tool for the propogation of these extractive relations, and how it holds the potential for an emancipatory reimagining of alternative ways of being in this toxic environment