MINE SONGS: SOUNDING AN ALTERED LANDSCAPE
MINE SONGS: SOUNDING AN ALTERED LANDSCAPE is a long-term project that uses instruments, environmental sound, image and archival material to reframe the altered landscape of Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range - my childhood and ancestral home. In my youth, I was carted twice a week across Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range from Hibbing to Virginia and back, past Ironworld, the Mahoning pit, the Bruce Mine headframe, and piles and piles of overburden. This was and is the landscape that ‘Iron Rangers’ (including my European immigrant family) created and have inhabited for more than 100 years. My parents transported me over and around this still-transforming terrain for violin lessons, but we always returned home to Hibbing, ‘the iron ore capital of the world’. Had it not been for the iron ore mining that dictated this landscape of home, none of my family might be here - in Northern Minnesota - or the United States.
Mine Songs is rooted in landscape, listening, and image: the complex fissure in our relationship with the earth, the power of sound to reorient our awareness toward our environments, the widened views of extraction industries' effects on the planet. I spent my childhood around this altered landscape - it is beautiful and I accepted it as my own natural environment. But beginning in the 1800s, the human activity of mining iron (succeeding clearcut logging) on the Mesabi Iron Range not only forever altered land that had been the same for millennia, it interrupted an ancient symbiotic relationship Native Americans had with what we now call Minnesota. European immigrants entered a necessary relationship with the environment based on non-renewable profit driven extraction - a relationship that had been in place in the United States for hundreds of years.
Mine Songs intends to reveal a complex lens through which to reflect on the stories we tell ourselves (or have been told) about history, power, identity, agency.
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MINE SONGS has received generous funding from Koneen Säätiö, Arrowhead Regional Arts Council, and the Minnesota State Arts Board.
PHOTOGRAPHS / PROCESS VIDEOS / SOUND MAP
