On Diminishment, II: Vanishing Points and Turbulent Pluvialities

1.

In the history of gold mining in South Africa, wealth was accrued by “working in the earth, not on the land,” as Rosalind Morris has put it.1 To work in the earth and underground was to be constantly exposed to the risk of explosive collapses or inundation by subsurface rivers. Morris writes of a “folded landscape that lies beneath the surface, lit only by artifice and inhabited by the dead.”2 It is a world traversed by networks and webs of water pipes and power lines, “a phantasmagorical world, a world of surfeit and surplus generated in the forge of violent extraction.”3 Between 1911 and 1994, 69,000 miners, mainly Black, were killed in South African mines, and more than a million were injured. These deaths and the many more half-lives produced by the disease of silicosis, by overexposure to mine dust, constitute the vanishing points of mining landscapes, the bodies (and lives) of whose labor constantly disappears in a material and metaphorical terrain of solid and fluid, vertical and horizontal.

I first saw the enormous Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot, Episode 9 (Precipitate) (2022), by William Kentridge high on the walls of his Johannesburg studio on a visit in mid- 2024. The drawing shows, at the lower horizon, a series of flatlands typical of the highveld surrounding Johannesburg and familiar in Kentridge’s work: mine dumps, stunted trees, and charred stumps, as well as the residues and perhaps recalibrations of what the artist has referred to as “civil engineering.” It is, however, unusual in his oeuvre in other ways. Much of the pictorial field depicts a scene of turbulent rainfall, or pluviality, and surging aerial atmospheres pervade the work. Across a narrow column of densely falling rainwater, known as an isolated thunderstorm in this part of the world, the word “Precipitate” is unfurled in cursive. And in the foreground of the piece, back on the level of the earth, is a small plaque which reads: “Sirens speaking from one continent to another.”

A closer look at the landscape surface of the drawing reveals what appear to be abandoned ventilation shafts, mining offices, and broken walls of former mining sites. An overdrawn red line is visible to the right. Red also tinges some of the turbulent air currents swirling through cumulus clouds. It is suggestive of acid mine drainage, toxic rust-infused water rising from underground and potentially carried by falling rain itself. Louise Bethlehem writes about how the marine cycles of an inland sea formed millions of years ago gave rise to the Witwatersrand reef and its gold and heavy metal deposits. Acid mine drainage, she adds, “possessed of all the menace of the revenant, mediates between the time of mining capital and the time of its corrosive afterlife—the now and future Anthropocene.”4

Kentridge draws with charcoal, part of the material matter of this landscape itself. This and so many of his other drawings, which are made and erased for animation in his short films, offer intricate depictions of a dry landscape that has been extracted from, abandoned, and depleted; its detritus left amongst short grasses charred from winter burns and pocked, dusty outcrops in the veld. Observing a relation in Kentridge’s work between “vanishing and creation,” Stephen Clingman references both the gold seams underground and the history of mining they imply, and how, as Kentridge draws with charcoal, places vanish into new outlines and are redrawn in other iterations. This implies two questions often associated with Kentridge’s work: “how do we remember that which is no longer here? What exactly is the trace of its existence?”5

The extractive violence of gold-mining cannot be conceptualized without the originary presence of water. Conditions of pluviality, once seen and observed, profoundly influence the depicted world, as do changing states of matter and metaphor that enable us to think about post-extractivist legacies in more expansive registers.6 The circulating meanings of the word “precipitate” in the drawing are manifold: substances deposited in solid form; unconsidered and often sudden actions; and a phonetic relation to precipitation, when water condenses from the Earth’s atmosphere, becomes too heavy to remain suspended, and falls to its surface. In what registers do Kentridge’s vast aerial turbulences speak? Such turbulence, in human-centered accounts, often implies aerial warfare, of which sirens warn. In its more material registers, it usually remains largely imperceptible to us (if not to the birds that ride its currents). As the air becomes laden with a moisture that cools and condenses as it rises, these currents “are revealed in the condensate’s diffraction of solar rays.”7 Kentridge’s drawing depicts the strange light that arrives from the turbulent pluvialities of the highveld and colors the outside walls of my home an almost preternatural gold.

The short intensity of isolated thundershowers seldom penetrate the very dry surface, which is why Kentridge does not depict sodden ground. The gathering clouds imply a major and potentially violent storm brewing and return us metonymically to the rushing rivers, flooding aquifers, and burst water pipes of the world underground. In this world of dry ground and underground flooding, of mine dust that kills as silicosis and rainwater that is intricately woven into extraction, life, and death, the dry technologies of mining have to be recalibrated as water and air. Kentridge’s sirens warn across continents, and the artwork draws together the ongoing refractions and aftermaths of colonial violence with the worsening crisis of accelerating climate change, including the atmospheric rivers that increasingly course through the skies across continents. 

Amitav Ghosh places the terraforming practices of settler colonialism itself at the center of current climate crisis. He draws terraforming from a science fictional imaginary invested in producing earth-like conditions on another planet into an extrapolation of colonial history and the extractive forms of violence that accompanied it, both on the land and in the earth itself.  Narratives of terraforming, Ghosh notes, “draw heavily on the rhetoric and imagery of empire, envisioning space as a ‘frontier’ to be conquered and colonized,”  revealing distinct modes of violence “in which environmental interventions and non-human entities played a central part.”8 When we think of post-extractive sites and their legacies and aftermaths in the context of multi-crisis today, we need to better understand them at the intersections of land, sky, water, and earth, across horizontal and vertical lines, registers of wet and dry, and forms of violence, death and living on.

2.

Late on the night of November 24, 2024, fourteen men and boys surfaced from deep underground at Stilfontein, not far from Johannesburg, the site of a disused mine shaft. The miners, known as zama zamas or illegal miners, were mostly Mozambican. As they surfaced, “their clothes were torn and muddy. Some of them had bare feet. They had been climbing for several days up the giant steel girders that held a transport elevator in place when the mine was still operational,” Kimon de Greef writes.9 The shaft, called Further, is deeper than a mile and no longer ventilated. It emits hot vapor that billows upwards like steam. The men were soaking wet and had cuts on their hands.”10

Beginning in September 2024, in an attempt to force miners to the surface, police and the military started shutting down access points used by gold syndicates for delivering supplies underground to miners working the remaining gold seams in disused mine shafts. The operation was called “Vala Umgodi” (Close the Hole). Underneath Johannesburg and its surrounding areas is an interconnected labyrinth surrounding some of the deepest mines in the world. That November, 1,200 zama zamas surfaced and were arrested. Some of the mine shafts now function as pump stations for groundwater that inundates surviving mines in the area, de Greef’s reporting reveals, further demonstrating that it is not currently understood how the shafts link together and many areas have either caved in or been flooded.11 De Greef describes how the men hauled out of the shafts were both dripping and dehydrated. To minimally hydrate underground, they had drunk contaminated groundwater. Around the holes, rubble lies everywhere.

In 2016, Rosalind Morris released a documentary film titled We are Zama Zama. The film is a formidable and sharply compassionate account of mostly Zimbabwean men who then mined disused mining shafts for the small seams of gold remaining in the rock and rubble, often trudging through mud and water in deep darkness. The film shows men who are working more than a mile underground with hammers, bike lights, and very little oxygen and water. Morris describes these “utensils” as the “most minimal kinds of implements.” Pointing out how this “manual technology” is being used in spaces created by “extravagant industrial technology” in tunnels created by huge drills, she goes on to distinguish between the end of the “payability” of a mine and “what is payable for individuals who have only their bodies.”12 In the gap between payability and absolute closure, informalization takes place, driven partly by the “dream of gold,” partly by an interest in secondary extraction: cable, copper, the mines themselves and their infrastructure are mined.13 The film splices the extremities of underground informal labor with the mens’ homes and dwellings on the surface, their conversations, conviviality, friendships, families, all alongside the utensils of ordinary living.

As the devastating crisis at Stilfontein reached its nadir in November, with attempts to “smoke out” miners by denying them food or water underground, Morris was asked to observe the differences between conditions in 2016 and in 2024. What she pointed to was the changed terrain: “all the infrastructure is being dismantled—even the old [mining] headgear, that great, strange creature that towers above Durban Deep, one of its legs is missing. There is a kind of scavenging that has taken over everything.” Morris describes how ordinary life has become more difficult: “there’s much more desperation. Places that were once very fully occupied are quite vacated now. It’s much more dominated by quite powerfully armed gangs … There’s water shortages, there’s fear, there’s a great deal of violence, and there is very little response from the police that doesn’t take the form of sieges [of mine shafts].”14 In all of this, there is rising ethnic conflict, some would say xenophobia, which Morris considers to be “the ghost of apartheid.”15 So, too, she notes, has the gold price risen: from $1,200 an ounce in 2016 to $2,600 in 2024, making illegal mining more lucrative even as it intersects ever more fully with death, fear, drenching and scavenging under the strange shadow of a one-legged mine head. The price of gold has since taken several further major leaps.

3.

In the detritus of partially dismantled infrastructure, in scenes of the re-used “utensils of life,” and in the turbulent pluvialities and vanishing points of holes in the rubble scattered at their entrances, there are so many questions to be asked. Questions, that is, about how modes of decay and brokerage, scaffolding and scavenging, take on new sets of prosthetic entanglements. Questions, too, of how architectural practice might both rummage in the rubble of what was there and what is there now to find a possible form, working in relation to injustice, elemental shifts and reconstruction. 

Credit: Kimon de Greef