holes in the ground once marked “resource-rich” (quarry, mine),
holes that perforate marble and limestone for systematic removal (drill, core);
holes that are filled back up with industrial contaminants or municipal solid waste (landfill, dump),
holes that show up as piles elsewhere (deep excavation, tailing);
holes that render high-quality lumber unusable and therefore, waste (knot, crack, chip, defect);
holes in the accounting spreadsheets and toxicity reports of corporations;
holes in the wages and physical bodies of workers in construction, demolition, and waste management, invisible figures who are continually exhausted and rendered expendable under capitalism…
Construction has long been considered a growth industry, where building materials are consumed as if they were on-demand and infinite in supply. Yet the size of our holes keep growing: these long-obscured peripheries of material and labor extraction that can no longer be kept out-of-sight, out-of-mind. The reader may find that some of the documents in this file come with their own perforations and punctures. These cuts are made deliberately in an effort to reflect the numerous redactions of material life in their one-way anthropogenic transformation into resource, property, and waste. How big must these voids of extraction and consumption grow, before the construction and raw material industries pivot to more renewable and circular alternatives?
Silicosis. Pneumoconiosis. Fibrosis. Black lung disease. When minerals such as marble, granite, coal, and sand are extracted, transported, and refined, they release loose particulate matter — dust — that can cause irrevocable scarring in the lungs. Lesions appear as white occlusions in x-rays and CT scans, coalescing in the void of lung space. Once inhaled, the dusts of extraction can never be expelled.
The remineralization of rock strata deep within workers’ bodies should not be classified as just another “occupational hazard,” but as a form of slow violence. By perforating the earth’s finite geological crust, we are also simultaneously rupturing the lungs of miners, construction workers, tunnel drillers, sandblasters, quarry and foundry workers, stone carvers and polishers, ceramics workers, and brick workers. Some things should be left in the ground.
Amelyn Ng is a Singaporean-Australian architect and Assistant Professor at RISD Architecture in Providence, Rhode Island. She was previously a Wortham Fellow at Rice Architecture in Houston. Working in research, drawing and exhibitions, across scales and between digital and physical mediums, Ng explores architecture as media and environmental matter as information. Her work seeks counter-narratives and alternative representations to architecture's status quo, particularly around climate and social questions. She is also a sometimes-cartoonist.
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