15 February 2024 – 17.30-19.00: TU-Delft - Berlage Room 1 - Julianalaan 134, 2628 BL Delft
On 15 February, Hannah le Roux (University of Sheffield) will give the lecture 'Surface And Underground Archives: Evidencing The Witwatersrand's Mining Impact'. This lecture is part of the lecture series 'Sourcery: Archives in the Spotlight – History Talks'
The Witwatersrand in South Africa - now Johannesburg, Soweto and other towns - was the source of significant gold reserves mined since the 1880s. In the first decades it was arguably the most intensely mapped region of the early 20th century. The State mandated the use of large scale, dynamic surface maps for inspection, creating granular details of tailing heaps, water bodies, plantations, housing, rail, and roads, along with mining plant.
Mining wound up in the 2000s, and today the land is being cleared for new uses. But mining impacted land presents specific design challenges: legacy issues of soil and water toxicity, unstable geology, and fragmented land parcels, as well as potentials lying in infrastructural residues and undeveloped surface land. Along with Wits and TU Delft colleagues, Hannah le Rou has been working with the mine’s archives of such sites to conceptualise reparative futures. Beyond their rich surface maps, however, categories of underground material - further empirical maps, but also undrawn cartographies known to former miners - stand as evidence of extractive violence on bodies and ecosystems. Reparative work involves retrieving and laminating these layers across time and depth.