Weird quantities: characterising monstrous landscapes of extraction in the Anthropocene

Abstract

ABSTRACT Modern mining operates on enormous scales and quantities that go beyond everyday comprehension, which in turn has existential and metaphysical implications, and this article is an experiment in characterising ‘existentially disturbing’ aspects of extraction landscapes. We attempt to characterise and make sense of the Hannukainen mining landscape with regard to its deeply contradictory and dissonant – effectively monstrous – nature as an experienced place. Specifically, we explore various affective, emotional and psychological impacts of the (now closed) Hannukainen mine in Finnish Lapland. Drawing on the so-called ‘new weird’ fiction, we employ a ‘weirding approach’ into the ambivalent, unsettling and disorientating aspects of an extraction landscape in relation to the socio-ecological condition of the Anthropocene. We seek to identify how various features of the Hannukainen landscape resonate with deeper and broader cultural ideas of, for instance, aboveground and belowground and the this-worldly and otherworldly. We conclude that there is an interplay of presences and absences in Hannukainen, which generates uncertainty, disorientation and compromises the very coherence of the mine as an experienced landscape, placing it in a weird in-betweenness of non-linear spatialities and temporalities associated with monsters and the monstrous.