Terra Forming
As I drove through Catas Altas, another mountainous area rich in precious mineral deposits, I slipped into another dimension. Vast plumes of dust rose from intense pink-red earth. In the distance, monumental, stepped terraces loomed like ancient ziggurats. Shattering sonic explosions emptied the air of birds. Dismembered rocky cliffs, and all around me, crazed machinery pulverising anything that stands in its way. This is terra forming in action, conducted at a scale that belongs to SF films about the colonisation of barren worlds. It is not as far-fetched as it might seem. In his landmark study of SF, Darko Suvin, talked of forms ofrepresentation that estrange, but which allow us to recognise its subject at the same timeas it renders it unfamiliar.[1] I coined my own version, “narratives of an exaggerated present.”[2] Photographs of immense mining landscapes perform just such a function in that they invoke other worldly realities that verge on the implausible. As the relentless excavation of valuable natural resources accelerates, hills and mountains are flattened, the planet groans and terminal extinction beckons. Out in the zone where the determination to annihilate nature continues apace, engineering workers are gripped by a fever that induces delusions of grandeur. " I loved my new work for a huge earthmoving company, …the machines were something else, they ate up the land like crazy, they swallowed up hills, for them, there was no such thing as a mountain...I think I once levelled an entire state near Maranhão...Mate, what an earthmoving job that was, it lasted a year, three hundred machines bringing down mountains of rock, and filling-in every valley that resembled hellholes. They took stone, earth and weeds from here, threw them down there, the hill vanished, the hole got smaller, until everything evened out into a beautiful field of red earth, or if it was white earth, an endless beach...the mining boss’s dream was to level the whole of Brazil, which then, he said, would be the flattest country in the world...[3]
[1] Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Yale University Press, 1979
[2] The cold war finds a common home: The intertwined worlds of Philip K. Dick and the Strugatsky Brothers, in Charley, J, The Routledge Companion to Architecture, Literature and the City, (London; 2019)
[3] Brandão, Ignacio de Loyola, Não Veras País Nenhum, (Global Editora; São Paulo, 1996) (1981), p215