Copper Connections
Copper connections and the aesthetics of absence
The industrial extraction of raw materials exhausts and discards places as a matter of course, leaving behind successive landscapes of dereliction and disinvestment. The research project involves a comparative case study of two post-industrial regions ( Cornwall, UK and Montana, US), both used and subsequently abandoned by the copper mining industry. The paper is concerned not primarily with the social or economic effects of abandonment, but with questions of aesthetics and absence. What do people make of these remaindered places, and how are they recuperated and appropriated through aesthetic practices? How do artists and others seek to occupy and document these spaces, and who are the secondary consumers of their encounters? How does the photograph function as a site for the negotiation of cultural value? Do certain traces and remains lie outside the range of aesthetic appropriation?