Today Future Terrains launches its first awareness-raising campaign. We are calling it #MineClosurePerspectives and it considers the issues of mine closure and mining legacies through the lens of photography. It hopes to broaden perspectives among mining stakeholders of all kinds.
#MineClosurePerspectives is not a protest against mining, nor a diatribe against environmentalism, nor a polemic; it aims to challenge such perceptions by encouraging the viewer to contemplate the often discrete, stark beauty and cultural relevance of mined landscapes oft hidden by the intensity of the wider visual, the focus on negativity, the controversy, or blinkering by discipline and dogma.
Every week for the next 20 weeks Future Terrains will post a photograph of a place, person, or object connected either directly or indirectly with mine closure – including abandoned mines and their environs too. A short blog will be posted on www.futureterrains.org that describes the image. The image will also be tweeted via @FutureTerrains with a link to the blog description.
The reasons behind this campaign are many fold: it is partly stimulated by the run-up to the Mine Closure 2014 conference in Johannesburg in October and the increasing number of other events on this subject, but also the growing global awareness among mining industry stakeholders about the importance of mine closure as an issue, and the frustrating (technical, regulatory and socio-economic) limitations of current practices.
We hope you enjoy these images over the next 20 weeks. Please feel free to comment or contact Future Terrains with any suggestions for future campaigns.
