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

‘Alas’, said the mouse, ‘the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into’. ‘You only need to change your direction’, said the cat, and ate it up. Franz Kafka, A Little Fable, 1931

1. Introduction

The aim of this paper is to articulate the inscription of slow and structural violence (after Nixon, 2011, Grewal and Sabherwal, 2019) onto the denial of public memorial in the Swedish mining city of Kiruna. An industrial mining city situated approximately 100 km north of the Arctic Circle in Norrbotten county, Kiruna has a population of approximately 22,000 inhabitants, one-third of whom are employed directly by Lussovaara-Kirunavaara Aktiebolag (LKAB), an iron-ore mine that borders the city. As such, the city’s economic stability is heavily vested in LKAB, a critical attribute of both Kiruna and Sweden’s political economy. LKAB’s underground pit subtends diagonally beneath the town of Kiruna to a minable depth of at least two kilometres. As a result of the continued mining beneath the city, Kiruna is currently undergoing a process of mass resettlement to a newly constructed city centre, three kilometres to the east of the city’s boarder with the mine.

As a result, an area known first formally, but now colloquially, as the Deformation Zone (DZ) has emerged. Kiruna’s DZ radiates from the western margins - as seen in Figure 1. below - of the city to demarcate and enclose approximately one-third of Kiruna’s entire population, and two-thirds of the towns’ built environment. The term ‘deformation zone’ itself comes directly from the technics of industrial mining, the articulation of the numerical modelling used in geodetic measurement to determine the extent of areas affected by extractive practices beyond the exploited seams themselves. Yet, the DZ as a term incorporates not only the extent of the area that would be subsumed by the mine, but also as an indicator of the extent of the physical decay and ruination of the built environment that is owned by LKAB and constitutes the living conditions within the DZ.

Figure 1. Image of the E10, former main road, abruptly turning into a footpath. In the background of the image can be seen the office buildings of LKAB, sitting above the former open-pit on Kiruna’s western margin. Photo by author, September, 2020.

LKAB, along with the local municipal council, have framed the resettlement as a collaborative effort with the inhabitants of the city, and as a tribute to the legacy of an entwined mine and township. However, LKAB’s version of historical events neatly omits the inherent colonial violence of their extractive legacy (Össbo, 2018, 2022), as well as the dereliction of the built environment of the DZ (Boyd 2023). The ongoing omission of the colonial violence in LKAB’s heritage narrative suggests a lack of willingness to address such past encounters. Which leads to the question: if colonial violence as a means of expropriation of land for resource accumulation remains unaddressed, what forms does it take today and upon who is it so visited?

In this paper I evidence the slow and structural violence of derealisation, as it is meted out through the denial – or silencing – of grassroots, public commemoration of Kiruna’s formerly settled site by the mining company LKAB. In doing so, I am articulating the entangling and co-productive composition of these concepts as they operate in practice. Although, it is important to note that not all of Kiruna’s residents, including those that wished to organise memorial services, were necessarily against the resettlement. Most actively supported the move, understanding the harsh trade-off between expansion of the mine and the loss of two-thirds of the former town – their own domestic stability – as a sacrifice baked-in to being a community member in Kiruna. Neither is the silencing of dissenting narratives in Kiruna is pronounced, yet as I evidence in this paper, the silence actively disenfranchised members of the community. Furthermore, LKAB’s self-proclaimed embeddedness within Kiruna’s communities amplifies their lack of acknowledgement of my informants’ sentiments regarding their being silenced.

Having encountered violence as an amorphous and acutely bureaucratic means of silencing dissent, I frame the practice as overlapping and multifaceted modes of structural and slow violence (after Nixon, 2011, Grewal and Sabherwal, 2019). Such violence is productive of, and produced by, the implementation of a practice of derealisation (Butler 2004) against those that voice counter-hegemonic claims against the mining company LKAB in Kiruna. LKAB’s deployment of a covert and indistinct violence is done in order to pre-emptively assuage ‘issues of accountability and guilt’ (Vinitzky-Seroussi and Teeger, 2010, p. 1105) as they relate to the invocation of their historically contentious means of accumulating land for access to resources via displacement and expropriation.

To do this, I will begin by outlining the how Judith Butler’s (2004) concept of derealisation works in symphony with Rob Nixon’s (2011) slow violence, and the structural violence of the everyday as articulated by Veena Das (2008), Akhil Gupta (2012), and David Graeber (2015). From here, the tensions inherent in the schismic historicisms (Palmie and Stewart, 2020, Stewart, 2016) between LKAB’s narrative of Kiruna’s moral utopian design and their legacy of deploying violently colonial means to accrue land and resources.

Framing the tension in Kiruna’s historicisms provides the premise upon which LKAB’s deployment of derealisation is at its most utilitous: the denial of public commemoration of Kiruna’s demolition is enacted as a means of subduing the colonial legacies of resource accumulation. In laying out the means by which power is maintained by LKAB in Kiruna via covert and indistinct modes of violence, I point towards resistance as slowly emerging in response to the materiality of living conditions within the DZ.

2. Covert and indistinct violence

As Hannah Arendt (1970) tells us, violence is inherently unpredictable. Its form and substance, its mode of delivery and the ways and means by which it is deployed and upon whom it is received are so amorphous as to render it akin to coercive political or economic systems rather than a gene-deep, structural condition of biological certainty (cf. Fanon, 1961).

My own ethnographic research in Kiruna, along with others evidence’s how the violence in Kiruna does not occur in a normative physical form (Boyd 2023, Lopez, 2021). Instead, the violence encountered and articulated by my informants occurred under the banner of bureaucratic administration (Gupta, 2012, Graeber, 2015) and top-down urban planning (Baxstrom 2013, Hanafi, 2009, 2013). These two overlapping modes of governing and planning the resettlement acted to deny Kiruna’s inhabitants the ability to effect meaningful change to the planning of the new centre that would incorporate their needs, thus leading to feelings of alienation. These feelings were compounded by the fact that their homes would be demolished as part-and-parcel of a master plan. Physical, sensorial impacts of the violence only breached the surface of archetypal recognisability as the demolition of some districts closest the mine began in 2015, and the ruination of the built environment of the DZ set-in from 2018 onwards. Although the full, physically destabilising effects of the in-built violence of extractivism was nightly foreshadowed by the detonation of up to eight tonnes of emulsion-based explosives directly under the city.

As of 2021, the DZ was primarily composed of abandoned or evacuated buildings with crumbing façades, interspersed with empty shop fronts and a few remaining stores awaiting confirmation of relocation to the new centre. The buildings that stood empty were the ones purchased by LKAB and evacuated on account of a cost-benefit analysis weighed against its eventual necessary demolition. Such accounting would, in turn, determine the living conditions of those that dwelled within the building’s walls. Many structures within the zone were in varying states of decay, with exposed brickwork, rusted metalwork, or damaged roofs and guttering, all essential maintenance in Kiruna’s sub-arctic climate. The dereliction of these buildings constitute the bodies upon which physical violence through politically economic neglect was made visible in Kiruna (after Hage, 2021, Schubert, 2021, DeSilvey, 2017). It is this dilapidation and abandonment that my informants wished to acknowledge through acts of collective mourning and memorialisation.

In her treatise on the power of mourning as an act of resistance that defines communities against pulverising hegemonies of physical and structural violence, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler (2004) argues that

“(t)he public will be ‘created on the condition that certain images do not appear in the media, certain names of the dead are not utterable, certain losses are not avowed as losses, and violence is derealized (sic) and diffused. Such prohibitions not only shore up a nationalism based on its military aims and practices, but they also suppress any internal dissent that would expose the concrete, human effects of its violence’.

(ibid;38)

For Butler, the inability for the multiple effects of violence to be seen is bound up in the process of obscuring the act of violence from not only the capacity to be recognised and protested against, but being seen as an act of violence in the first place.

Derealisation is key to the process of dehumanising and Othering individuals and communities that are designated as cultivating social and political counter-hegemonies. These groups are often represented by reductionist and homogenising narratives delivered by politically dominant groups and actors (Butler 2004). In Butler’s formulation, derealisation is a socio-political venture, manufactured and distributed through media ecosystems that deny the broadcasting of humanising aspects of cultures that the state seeks to villainise (after Herman and Chomsky, 1988). The ritual and livelihood practices of offending communities are made absent from observation by a broader public and presented in a biased and controlled narrative that (re)produces hegemonic power dynamics between groups (Butler 2004).

Veena Das (2008) interprets this type of violence as structural. Radiating outwards from a particular mode of dominance, Das’s violence becomes entangled with and enfolded into the everyday. Through this weaving of violence into the everyday, its form and substance alter with time, shifting from a definite event or incident into a nebulous and internalised feeling. Focusing attention on the temporality of violence and its mutability from the physical to the structural points towards what Rob Nixon (2011) termed ‘slow violence’. Nixon’s violence is slow in that it ‘occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an additional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’. (ibid;2).

Slow violence differs from structural violence in that it’s perpetrator cannot be readily identified. In both David Graeber’s (2015) and Akhil Gupta’s (2012) formulation of structural violence, although distributed throughout an amorphous, nebulous network of deferential bureaucratic decision-making – Arendt’s ‘tyranny without a tyrant’ (1970;84) – there is still a locatable source of the violence. In the case of bureaucracy, it is often the state that is the source of this structural mode of violence. As Gupta shows, structural violence is ‘built into the making of the nation-state’ (Gupta, 2012, p. 21).

I use slow violence in-step with structural violence as the two operate in a covert way, deploying violence as a means of coercion and alienation devoid of embodied or sensorial appraisal through physical assault. In this way, both are intertwined in their capacity to operate ‘out of sight’ (Nixon, 2011, p. 2). Here, this invisibility inlays both slow and structural violence within the fold of derealisation.

Returning to Butler’s (2004) derealisation, as a conceptual tool it is little used for analysing socio-political power relations. However, the concept has been deployed instructively by Varman and Al-Amoudi (2016) in their investigation of public resistance to private sector land grabs in rural India. Varman and Al-Amoudi (ibid) use Butler’s derealisation (2004) as a means of conceptualising the process by which an economically dominant actor within a region can dehumanise and Other a particular group by denying them their right to collectively mourn. Their research demonstrates how the denial of collectivising with the specific aim of memorialising a loss at the hands of a particular group. In their case a corporate entity denies the opportunity to share counter-narratives (relating to social fallout from their mode of production) to said entity’s positive framing (largely as progressive economic growth that retains their environmental and social responsibility mandates) of production (ibid). The silencing of the production of counter-narratives to those that evince economic growth without human cost before they galvanise mass protest, Al-Amoudi and Varman (ibid) argue, is a central aim of derealisation, and Butler (2004) herself focuses particularly on the relevance of the denial of mourning and memorial practices as a means of weaponizing such silences.

3. Resistance as memorialisation: collectivising memory and inscribing the future

In their creation of a typology of silences, Vinitzky-Seroussi and Teeger (2010) identify that the practice of public memorialisation and mourning are a means of communicating and inscribing particular and often parochial memories and histories onto a collective future. Indeed, multiple recent studies on the role of memorialisation in the articulation of collective, community-centric histories show these practices as productive of primarily counter-hegemonic narratives (Brand et al, 2022, Caylı, 2022). Dhooleka Raj (2000) has argued for the importance of gathering under the premise of remembering, both acts of resistance and individuals, as a process of organising disjointed narratives and casting aside certain facts that may interfere with a broader ‘truth’ the group wish to invoke.

Mark Fisher (2009, 2014) repeatedly argued that the primary means of accruing capital is enforcing and then reinforcing forgetfulness. Fisher’s (2009) asserts that as markets are risk averse, products cannot stray far from previously successful models. As such, corporations actively pursue the manufacturing of forgetting in order to essentially repackage goods. Fisher goes on to argue that, as a result of capitalisms cultural ubiquity, forgetfulness is now the dominant mode of engaging with culture in the West (see also Fraser, 2022). Francois Bonnet (2020) echoes this argument, going further to suggest that collective amnesia is a central requirement of economic growth. In order to forget the violence inherent to expanded resources frontiers near- or already- exhausted, individuals and societies must forget how their products are produced and their energy supplied. Both Bonnet (ibid) and Fisher (2009, 2014) imply that acts of remembering, of memorialising, in such a dominant culture are acts of resistance.

Although both the corporate enforcement of forgetfulness and the collective act of forgetting in remembrance are used to forge cohesive narratives, they differ primarily in that the latter is done in order to attain or reassert social formations and to build or maintain communities, the former in the pursuit of accumulating resources and wealth through the pre-emptive silencing of dissent. The question then arises: what is it that LKAB are trying to silence, and what is it my informants are trying to remember?

4. Contentious historiographies and prefiguring Kiruna’s future

The futural aspects of Kiruna’s resettlement can be seen as a tension inherent to the logics of capital: the accumulation of resources in contest with the legitimacy of access to land. Legitimacy, in the case of Kiruna, is bound up with LKAB’s need to secure the legal and economic right to expand the mine via the reparations required to be paid by the Swedish Minerals Act (1991).

In 1898 Kiruna became an experiment in city and social planning by LKAB. Using profits from the mine to fund the settling of Kiruna as a model city, funding the design and construction of housing projects, the hospital, schools, investing in public works and social mobility schemes, and founding trade and miners’ unions within the community (Viklund et al, 2015).

During the Oscarian era, named after King Oskar II, late 19th century Sweden undertook rapid expansion in its industrial capacities, engendering a boom in a well-heeled middle-class in-step with this expansion (Brunnstrom 1981). The Oscarian bourgeoisie, much like the Victorian throughout the British Empire of the time, had a preoccupation with high art: portrait and landscape paintings, music, sculpture, entertainment, heavily gendered institutional education, colonialism and the production of spatial imaginaries that fetishized the tempering of state frontiers (Malm, 2021, 2016). As Lopez notes, Kiruna’s development as a model city by LKAB was ‘reflective of settler colonial frontier ideology: a land imagined as simultaneously empty, wild, and lacking, but also highly desirable and full of potential (for economic and social reform)’ (Lopez, 2021, pp. 115–116, after Tsing, 2003). Cultural historian Åsa Össbo (2018, 2022) has begun the process of reframing LKAB’s historical narrative as one of settler colonialist violence and coercion. This is in stark contrast to the narrative that the mine itself (as local and state actor) and Kiruna municipality have used to articulate and frame Sweden’s industrial expansion into the country’s northernmost territories.

Settler colonialism, as a specific mode of state domination that operates to dispossess native peoples from their lands and install non-native, predominantly white, settler communities to ‘constitute an autonomous political body’ (Veracini, 2019, p. 1). With the specific aim of creating a ‘sociopolitical body that reproduces in the place of another (sociopoltical body)’ (ibid), settlers are commonly agents of the state, seeking out and occupying indigenous and non-native lands through military campaigns or government sponsored industrial development under the auspices of nation-building expansionism (Wolfe, 1999, 2006, Veracini, 2010, 2019). Settler colonialism is distinct in that it operates on a ‘logic of elimination’ (Wolfe, 2006, p. 387); to disappear the native population, as opposed to subordinating them. Today, in 2022, the Swedish occupation of Sápmi – the trans-Scandinavian indigenous lands within which Norrbotten is situated – is the legacy of successive waves of colonisation from at least the 17^th century onwards. As of this writing, the Swedish state, and indeed few of my informants in Kiruna, are yet to formally acknowledge the brutalising legacy of industrial expansionism into Sweden’s northernmost territories.

It is this legacy that I point towards as the primary reason that LKAB denied my informants the ability to collectively mourn the evacuation, ruination, and decay of their homes and businesses. My informants’ narrative belongs to a legacy of displacement, historically marginalised to facilitate the burgeoning wealth of mine and state through resource accumulation. A historicism buried by time, my informants desire to memorialise is subsumed by LKAB’s continual assertions of their benefactory legacy and intentions. A philanthropy of supposed care perpetuated by LKAB’s historicism, is evoked not only as a guiding inspiration for Kiruna’s ongoing resettlement, but as its very justification. And yet, the asymmetrical power dynamics that underlie LKAB’s narrative of philanthropic concern for the people of Kiruna are problematised by the environment of decay and ruination in which one-third of the town’s residents dwell while the new centre is constructed: the DZ.

5. The deformation zone

As LKAB refuse to maintain buildings within the deformation zone, ear-marked as they are for demolition in the near-future, the zone has become an area of physical decay and dereliction. As mentioned above, buildings in the DZ decay in repose, shops and apartments shuttered; a Chinese buffet restaurant had taken over a failed branch of Pinchos – a popular Scandinavian tapas restaurant – at the entrance to a commercially deprecating shopping mall, making use of the remnant decor and furniture, going so far as to rearrange the large, light-bulb inlayed ‘PINCHOS’ sign to read simply, brazenly, ‘CHIN’.

As anthropologist Violeta Schubert (2021) among others (see Hage, (2021, DeSilvey, 2017, Marder, 2016, Olsen et al, 2021, Olsen and Petursdottir, 2014), argues for the capacity of decay to evidence socio-material entanglements in what she terms a ‘rhetoric of Fated Subjectivity’ (ibid;21) among communities living among the increasingly derelict villages of rural Macedonia. Fated Subjectivity here refers to an internalisation of the dilapidated buildings and run-down infrastructure through and upon which her informants live. Schubert’s argument centres around narratives of abandonment engendered by the ruination of the surrounding environment, ‘in other words, leaving some histories, experiences, or categories of people to decay’ (ibid;21). Living in this state of ‘perpetual decay, their “fate”, compels non-engagement and passive conformity to the will of the powerful’ (ibid).

In contrast to Schubert’s conformity, I argue in the ethnography and discussion section that my informants internalisation and embodied fatalism of the evacuation and ruination of the DZ acts as a catalyst for resistance. As such, resistance emerges as a response to the disjuncture between LKAB’s alleged care for the inhabitants of the DZ, and the materiality conditions of the zone.

6. Methodology

My methodology relies heavily on an engagement of embodied senses to provide a phenomenological point of entry into the field and topic of inquiry (Pink, 2009). That phenomenological experience is contextualised through interview data and textual analysis of archive material that documented the development of Kiruna’s built environment and its role in the broader infrastructure of the site, at local, regional, and national scales (Dubois and Gadde, 2002). For example, Kiruna’s built environment was simultaneously a national industrial heritage site, a regionally demographically dense locale, and at the local level, provided homes, a means of earning an income (businesses) and access to essential resources (shops for food).

My data is gathered from interviews with four key informants and an additional twelve interlocutors, consisting largely of people living within the DZ: business owners, employees, residents of the zone. They were both men and women between the ages of 30 and 75 years old, and identified as white, Swedish or of trans-Scandinavian heritage. Most claimed indigenous heritage also, a distant uncle or a great-grandmother, but those that laid claim to this heritage also made clear they do not participate in Sámi livelihood practices, such as herding, fishing, or artisanal craft.

Given the experiential means of gathering data throughout my time in the field, an abductive approach was the most intuitive mode of accessing and articulating the information encountered and collected. A deeply malleable research approach, abductive reasoning allows for a continual interrogation and re-examination of the data gathered as time in the field goes on (Dubois and Gadde, 2002, Timmermans and Tavory, 2012). Given the nature of gathering and imposing theoretical frameworks a priori to the field, abductive reasoning allows for those frameworks to be discarded, or modified in light or data gathered in the field, allowing for a more accurate representation and reflection of in situ encounters (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012).

In this way, an abductive research design moves between the open-endedness of inductive reasoning, and the more hypothesis-driven deductive reasoning, to generate insight through pragmatism (Dubois and Gadde, 2002). The ‘nonlinear, dynamic interaction and feedback’ Boyd and Boyd (2017), p. 12) between and among theory, observation, and practice that abductive reasoning assembles – and can simultaneously disassemble – grants a more elucidative interpretation of data, especially so with nondiscursive informants (see Boyd and Boyd 2017) through its necessary continual re-evaluation (ibid, Paavola, 2005).

7. Ethical considerations

Data collection effectively ended once I had left the field in September 2021. I was able to run some data gathered while back home through a couple of informants, but beyond the noting of rote factual statements from news articles regarding the resettlement, the last of my data was gathered in August 2022 upon a brief return trip to the field. All informants and interlocutors were given full Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) before engaging in interviews. All recorded interviews were held on a personal encrypted hard-drive and uploaded to encrypted cloud storage at the University of Durham. All participants have been anonymised and have given their consent to their contribution to the research to be used in publications.

8. Ethnography and discussion

8.1. Silence and the necessity of memorialisation

Erik Niva, a sports journalist from Malmberget, an iron mining town that borders the intrusive opencast Admiral Pit owned by LKAB, says of his upbringing in Sweden’s orefields, ‘I come from a place which didn’t matter yesterday and won’t exist tomorrow’ (Sveriges Radio, 2019 transcribed and translated by ArkDes, 2020;59). Niva’s autobiography, presented initially as radio documentary, narrates a story of his generation’s alienation from the Swedish state through the rapid decline and ruination, followed by a spate of suicides among his peers, that occurred in Malmberget in the 1990’s.

Not enough of us cried. In the middle of the 1990’s, boys of my generation began killing themselves in my hometown. And they continued and continued to commit suicide. When we sat there in the hall for yet another memorial, we really didn’t understand why. All we knew was that the fence indicating an area in danger of collapsing was only a few hundred metres away and moved closer year after year. We knew that the houses around us were torn down and that the people we had grown up with disappeared and that one day the entire community would vanish into the mine’s enormous hole and be gone. Instead, the municipal council locked the balcony doors of the high rises so no one else could jump, and us, we closed the door to the assembly hall and went back to our maths class. No one said anything.

(ibid)

Niva’s elegiac confessional goes on to decry a particular form of masculinity that internalises trauma and renders those suffering silent, tying this form of masculinity directly to the hyper-masculine cultural tendencies of mining communities. The loss of home and community on account of the mine that simultaneously, perversely, sustains the town, too much to bear for some of his peers, that viewed the only viable way out of such feelings was over the railings of the balcony’s that provided panoramic views of Malmberget’s ruination.

But Niva goes further, understanding the onset of the trauma as an articulation of core-periphery dynamics, of a general lack of interest in the wellbeing of communities in Sweden’s northern counties by the state. That as long as these same communities are still providing resources upon which Sweden’s GDP relies, then those communities are considered healthy and functional: ‘That was part of the deal, living in Malmberget. For the community to exist, the ore had to be mined, but for the ore to be mined, the community also had to be torn down’ (ibid;60). The excerpt above also describes the privation of mourning displayed by the local municipal council, materialising as a locked-doors, lethal-means method of suicide prevention with no public addressing of the issue. The mourning, instead, is brief, private, held by the local school in which Niva and his peers attended. Local political silence on the issue is met by personal and communal silence, enfolding one in upon the other.

The ruination of Malmberget, is, of course, not the ruination of Kiruna, but the physical and social degradation of Malmberget looms spectral over Kiruna’s resettlement. As my informant First Gravedigger, a civil engineer at LKAB told me:

What happened with Malmberget in the 1980’s is like a ghost that hovers over what we do here (in the planning department). Malmberget has always been like this with Kiruna, a ghost that haunts what we do here. It was like this when Kiruna was first built, and it is like this now.

In 2005, Kiruna’s then mayor Kenneth Stalnacke stated publicly: ‘Kiruna must not become the new Malmberget’, (Salomonsson Juuso, 2004;34) referring directly to the ruination of the town by the expansion of the Admiral Pit.

For my informant Laertes, who witnessed their parents’ business and their family home fall behind-the-fence and become macerated by the Admiral Pit in Malmberget, the silence, especially in regards to mourning described by Niva, is also occurring in Kiruna.

Laertes: We are not allowed to think of the move in a bad way. Everything has to be happy and a positive. You can hear it when you talk to people hear; a lot think it is the best option; that everything will be better. So, when someone will say ‘oh, I don’t think it will be so great’, they are met with silence, or they will try to convince you otherwise. Of course, I am from Malmberget and perhaps I have seen this kind of thing before. In Malmberget we did not get the new buildings, the new city, and we did not get the money for our houses like we do here, so maybe they (LKAB) have learned their lesson. But they still do not talk about the negative, like Malmberget.

Me: Is there anything you can point towards where you felt that negative comments weren’t being heard? An example you can give?

Laertes: What comes to mind is how they said goodbye to the city chambers. They put on a night with bands playing and people gave speeches inside the building. Everyone was invited and it was a very nice evening. But there was no feeling of sadness at what was happening, it was only celebration. The music was happy and the speeches were happy and talked about the future. That is not just how I feel about it, my memory of it. Others felt that way too, we speak about it sometimes. I felt like we could not come together and feel sad about what was happening, even though we were standing in some place that had such meaning for us and that would be torn down in the coming days.

Laertes’s reflections on the closing night describe an evening not of memorialisation, nor of mourning the loss of the building and all it embodied, but instead as a means of celebrating Kiruna’s prospective future. Not so much a farewell party as a housewarming that misrepresented or failed to address the collective emotion on the night. Laertes reflections on the closing night celebration/commemoration mirrored those of other informants, most notably Second Gravedigger. Second Gravedigger was a proud advocate of LKAB and the resettlement of the town, but even they felt the memorialisation lacked a meaningful commemorative aspect, focusing instead on the promised growth and prosperity of the new settlement.

Both Laertes and Second Gravedigger had spoken with me previously about the sense of community the former city chambers had come to embody for them and others in Kiruna, as well as being a symbol of local governance and an architectural and aesthetic prowess of Kiruna’s intra- and post-war boom years. Designed by one of Sweden’s most prominent architects of the time, Artur von Schmalensee, the building was awarded the Kasper Salin prize by the Swedish Architect Association, recognising the building as one of the country’s most beautifully designed. In the years immediately after the construction of the former city chambers in 1962 it was used as a gallery and exhibition space. Most notably, the former city chambers housed one hundred original Picasso paintings throughout 1965. During the miners’ strike between 1969 and 1970, the former city chambers, it’s formal name Iglon (The Igloo) by-then traded-out by locals for the less formal nickname of Kiruna’s ‘vardagsrum’ (Living Room), became the site of protest speeches and debates, attracting miners and their families from throughout Sweden’s orefields (Carrasco, 2020). In 2001, the former city chambers were recognised as a site of not only local heritage, but as a core constituent of Sweden’s industrial heritage, and as such, granted national heritage status under the Heritage Conservation Act (Sjoholm, 2016).

Yet whatever protections the awarding of such status granted, as of 2006 the former city chambers entered in the labyrinthian vortex of the Sweden’s hypercomplex (Baxstrom 2013) bureaucratic planning system. Sjoholm’s (2016) work is again instructive here, as she details the means, if not exactly the details, by which the former city chambers lost its heritage status and was consigned in 2014 to be the first public building demolished for the resettlement. It is useful to quote Sjöholm’s invaluable archive work at length here:

‘The pivotal moment that occurred between 2006 and 2014 was the adoption of the detailed development plan for Gruvstadsparken and the area first to be affected by subsidence. The shift in planning approach can be traced in the planning documents (…) The draft consultation version of the detailed development plan shows that the local authority initially proposed the relocation of all protected buildings within the planning area (Kiruna Council 2009). This was supported by the local authority’s value assessment of buildings within the planning area, which was a part of the environmental impact assessment associated with the detailed development plan. This investigation suggested that most historic buildings should be relocated and, in most cases, restored to their original condition.

(Kiruna Council 2010)

However, the proposal to move protected buildings was later withdrawn (Kiruna Council 2010a) when the local authority and LKAB made an agreement regulated by civil law about the mining company’s liability and undertakings. The detailed development plan for Gruvstadsparken, adopted by the local authority in 2011, stipulates that only five of the originally 23 protected buildings within the area will be relocated (Kiruna Council 2010a) During the amending of the detailed development plan, the local authority and LKAB made a civil law agreement, which precisely outlined the buildings that would be kept and relocated, within the whole town and during the entire urban transformation process (of these buildings, the former city chambers was not one) (…) How these particular buildings were chosen is not accounted for in the detailed development plan or associated documents’.

(ibid;52)

The result of these negotiations was the removal of the former city chambers heritage status, allowing for the building to be ‘decomissioned’ (to use LKAB’s terms) and later demolished. As discussed in the previous chapter on planning bureaucracies, multiple informants noted how they had felt increasingly detached from the discussions around the former city chambers, and that they’re collective desire to see it relocated or rebuilt at the new centre had not been taken into consideration once the negotiations had reached the county administration level.¹

In an essay for the ArkDes project Kiruna Forever (in Carrasco, 2020), Sámi author and journalist Ann-Helén Laestadius recounts the difficulty in seeing the destruction of buildings that link her to both her Self and the surrounding environment within which she feels entangled. In the piece, Laestadius details the affecting sense of loss she felt at the demolition of both her former childhood home in the Ullspiran district in 2015 and then again with the demolition of the former city chambers two years later. In an affecting line about the latter process, Laestadius writes: ‘At first I felt like they should have hidden the brutal demolition behind a gigantic tarpaulin, sparing our hearts and eyes. But perhaps it was good to be forced to follow the destruction bit by bit in order to comprehend it (…) And I mourn it’ (ibid;184). Here, Laestadius reveals a perversity to the demolition process in Kiruna, namely the inconsistency between the reticence of the mine and the municipality surrounding public memorialisation and mourning counterposed against the visible, destructive violence of the act of demolishing a building that has attained a kind of personhood. The building appears as a body that is being publicly dismembered, and mourning is, yet again, confined to the private, to personal reflection.

The topic of memorialisation and mourning was raised by my informant Gertrude. During coffee one morning early in 2021 in the shared staff room in which the offices of a local charity is located. Gertrude was describing how the funding worked for the charity’s projects and how those funds and funders had been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Primarily, many of the funders are local businesses, the biggest of which being LKAB, with limited funding from the municipality. With the onset of the pandemic, many of the charity’s funders decided to suspend their contributions to the charity in order to brace themselves for any financial impacts they may face as a result of decreased numbers of customers. My informant was describing how limited the options were for what the charity could pursue to enliven the deformation zone, on account of both local pandemic restrictions and reduced funding, when they also added that LKAB had actively dismissed projects the charity had put forward that centred around memorialising the buildings in the deformation zone and creating spaces for the mourning of their loss.

Gertrude: The mine do not like it when we go to them with ideas that they say are ‘sad’. They only want to see celebrations in the centre here. We went to them with an idea for a project that would bring in some graffiti artists and ask them to hold workshops with the locals here so we could paint some of the abandoned buildings. The idea was that we would let people interact with the buildings in a positive manner, and they could say to goodbye to these buildings in their own way before they are torn down. Some of the people lived in the buildings (that The charity had planned to paint) and haven’t been back to them or anything. We thought this was a happy idea, to come together and say goodbye and to mourn that the buildings will no longer be here. To have them bright and colourful before they are torn down. But no. LKAB said that they would not fund this project, they didn’t want the buildings to be interacted with in any way.

Me: Was this because of a safety concern? The buildings are abandoned because the municipality and the mine have found them unsafe, I thought?

Gertrude: We wouldn’t be in the buildings, just using the walls on the outside. But LKAB have done this before with other projects we wanted to do. We have had other ideas about how to say goodbye to Kiruna, to the city centre here, Meschplan and the Snuffboxes (nickname for the Erskine buildings) that don’t involve the buildings, but they won’t put any money towards anything like this.

My informant Osric, city planner and civil engineer employed by LKAB echoed Gertrude’s observations about the unwillingness of LKAB to engage with any form of commemoration of the deformation zone that didn’t celebrate the construction of the new centre. Although initially skirting around the topic, Osric gave an example from the inception of Gruvstadparken (Mining City Park)² in 2012, telling me that the park initially featured sculptures commissioned by the mine, but that people were not interested in them. When the mine asked what the people of Kiruna would prefer during a consultation, the overwhelming message was for something that paid homage to the loss of the buildings which Gruvstadparken would replace, but as of 2021, nothing had been commissioned by the mine.

9. Derealisation as violence

A city which belongs to just one man is no true city

Sophocles, Antigone, 441BC

Perhaps the clearest indication of LKAB’s reasoning behind their reluctance to fund, host, or even acknowledge publicly, a means of collectively mourning the loss of Kiruna as it currently stands was given by my informant in the mine’s public relations office during our last interview together in May of 2021. After I pushed them on why the mine have not engaged with providing a platform or means by which the people of Kiruna can mourn the loss of their town together with LKAB, my informant replied,

What do we have to mourn? We are giving them a new city, and we are able to continue mining. There is little to be mourned, yes people are giving up their homes and businesses, but we are paying them more than is fair. The new city will be a wonderful opportunity for Kiruna, so I do not understand it. I cannot understand why we would host anything like this. (a memorial service for the town)

Here, I argue, is the kernel by which LKAB justifies the resettlement and disguise the structural violence it deploys to dispossess the people of Kiruna. The denial of mourning as a means of silencing and derealising, and thereby dehumanising and Othering those that do not agree with the mine’s expansion. In refusing to engaged with and as such recognise the reasoning behind my informants need to mourn the loss of their town, LKAB and the municipality are actively pursuing Butler’s (2004); the slow and structural violence by which the collective memory and identity of a community is negated:

‘(w)e have to wonder under what conditions public grieving constitutes an “offense” (sic) against the public itself, constituting an intolerable eruption within the terms of what is speakable in public? What might be “offensive” about the public avowal of sorrow and loss, such that memorials would function as offensive speech?’

(2004;36)

In relation to Kiruna, the offence given is that of the collective realisation that the demolition of Kiruna is a loss that extends beyond the financial and into the deeply personal. It is a violence committed not in rapidity on the level of the physical, but slowly and structurally, through the denial of grief extended to Kiruna’s built environment.

Derealisation is instructive here too, and in Butler’s seeking to articulate what is lost when relationships between humans are severed by physical violence, I point towards the importance of Kiruna’s materiality, and as such, its loss, for my informants. In sum, Butler argues that the mourning loss – of place, community, or an individual relationship – is often bound to the realisation of the profundity of the relationship between self and Other. As such, any loss experienced as loss is necessarily a forfeiture of the self. Within this revelatory state, the ties which bind a self to an Other are delineated.

Using loss as a conceptual suspension through which a Self/Other binary is dissolved, Butler opens-up a discussion about what, socially and personally, is at stake when loss is articulated. Butler speaks to the entwined emotional and social attachments between humans, suggesting that when a human-human relationship breaks down and is lost, in this example due to physical violence, what is also lost is a part of ourselves. Butler also emphasises the need for mourning to occur in order to provide space within which such revelations can take place. Kiruna’s existence as a mining town plays a significant role in adapting Butler’s concept of derealisation to address less distinct modes of violence, committed through the destruction and ruination of an environment, rather than the communities that dwell upon it.

Here, cultural geographer Caitlin DeSilvey’s (2017), and archaeologists Bjørnar Olsen and Þóra Pétursdóttir’s (2014) articulations of the human-nonhuman entanglements exposed by the ruination of a built environment are instructive. Coupled with historian Pierre Nora’s (1996) concept of lieux de memoire (places of memory) and philosopher Dylan Trigg’s (2012) phenomenology of place, Olsen and Pétursdóttir assert that memories, personal, communal, and collective, solidify ‘as objects, sites or places, generating locales or lieux of collective remembering’ (Olsen and Petursdottir, 2014, p. 8). Yet, it is in places’ material ruination that the entangled and constituent social, political, economic, and technological parts reveal themselves; deconstruction of the physical begets a deconstruction of the abstract and phenomenological (Hage, 2021, Schubert, 2021); all that is air coalesces into form, then is pulverised back into the ether. Memory of the material and all it came to mean, its shape and the meaning that filled that shape, comes to the fore much as sensation returns to a phantom limb (Trigg, 2014).

In step with philosopher Trigg’s observations of the distributedness of the human psyche within the body and among the environment (2012, 2014), DeSilvey’s (2017) critical focus is on the materiality of the built environment as an affective terrain that harbours the need for a level of care akin to that of the human body and psyche (ibid). DeSilvey’s broader theme at work here is the treatment of buildings as materials that have been woven into the personal and social fabric of communities and people as an observation and practice that highlights their deeply entangled and co-productive nature. As such, it is the term entangling that I wish to tentatively put forward as the word Butler was searching for when she wrote that she had ‘no ready vocabulary’ (2004;22) for describing the dissolution of the boundaries and binaries between a Self and the Other in relation to the concept of derealisation.

Relating this to Butler’s quote above, we can begin to discern that an interpersonal relationship with the surrounding and habituating environment plays an important role in how my informants conceive of themselves in relation to Kiruna’s built environment. Identity becomes a distributed meshwork of relationships that relies on the places we exist in and through; the built environment as an extension of ourselves and how we navigate the world in a more than physical manner. In their constant dismissal of public memorial or mourning of the loss of the built environment through which my informants cultivated their lives, LKAB and the municipality deny access to the practice of collective vulnerability, simultaneously denying recognition of, as Butler (2004) argues, a fundamental aspect of humanity and ethical humanisation. This is a return to what my informant Laertes put forward as the failure of the state to recognise the people of Sweden’s orefields as anything other than secondary to the resources they dwell upon and labour to extract, as physical violence is meted out against the built environment with little observation of how this directly impacts those the violence has displaced.

LKAB and Kiruna municipality’s refusal to acknowledge my informants desire to express collective grief at the loss of their homes and businesses evidences the mine’s lack of compassion for the needs of the displaced. Furthermore, it derealises the needs of those that wish to mourn Kiruna’s loss as deserving of genuine consideration. Through this derealisation, LKAB’s desire for the resettlement to be viewed in a purely positive light goes unchallenged, and the mine’s stance takes on a form of marginalising and silencing narratives that do not reaffirm that narrative. This silence itself, as well as the act of silencing, is a form of violence-in-itself (Arendt 1970), serving to facilitate LKAB’s accumulation of resources through the expropriation of those that live within Kiruna’s deformation zone.

10. Conclusion

Building on both Butler’s original conception of derealisation as a practice of denying public mourning and memorial, and Varman and Al-Amoudi’s deployment of the concept to articulate violence committed in the pursuit of resource accumulation, this paper has positioned derealisation as a key concept to be considered when examining the slow and structural violence of corporate pro-growth narratives, especially in the mining industry.

Here, I return to a silence that has historical precedent within LKAB’s creation and growth as a mining company that drove settler migration into Norrbotten: a violently contentious and largely unacknowledged history. Silence and the act of silencing that LKAB engage in via their refusal to fund commemorations or memorialisations of the loss of Kiruna’s built environment are yet additional forms of the multiple, overlapping modes of slow and structural violence the mine apportion to my informants. However, in direct relation to the expropriation and ruination of the built environment within the DZ, a resistance is emerging. Taking the form of a desire for alternative, bottom-up, collective memory to be recognised and given credence by the state. This memory recognises a latent coloniality in LKAB’s process of land acquisition, embedded within the legacy of the development of the first iteration of Kiruna’s settlement at the turn of the 20^th century.

In this paper I have demonstrated the slow and structural violence through which the mining company LKAB have denied the ability for my informants to gather for public memorialisation of their former homes and businesses. In doing so, I argue for Judith Butler’s derealisation to be considered as a core constituent of the nebulous and amorphous violence of which others have spoken when they deploy the overlapping terms of slow and structural violence. Derealisation is a conceptual and practical means of obscuring acts of violence that reaffirm or enshrine dominance from both the public view and readymade definitions. Key to derealisation’s competency is its capacity for rendering invisible the alienation and disfigurement upon which acts of slow and structural violence are premised. To this end, derealisation and slow violence are entangled and co-productive concepts.

And yet, in the desire to have their memories collectivised and made public through acts of commemoration and memorialisation, the formation of a ground from which resistance can emerge is manifesting. If Nixon’s slow violence ‘occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an additional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.’, (2011;2), then slow resistance in Kiruna also occurs out of sight, across a delayed destruction dispersed across space and time, and is typically not considered resistance at all.

In memory of Jake Childs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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.

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.