Artist Statement

Absent Machine explores the extensive waste of infrastructural resources linked to de-industrialisation - in this instance the dissolution of Charbonnages de France, the French National Coal Board. It contrasts two modalities of becoming for infrastructures of extraction - the archive and the ruin - inviting differing forms of affective engagements. Photographs were taken at the Centre des Archives Industrielles et Techniques de Moselle (CAITM), a former coal mining facility turned archive. Others at Cuvelette, a former colliery situated in the town of Freyming-Merlebach, France.

CAITM is situated at the fringe of a vast expanse of forests, in Sainte-Fontaine, a district of the town of Saint-Avold in the Lorraine region, whose population, until the 1980s, was mainly employed at the coal mining site located at its outskirts. A short walk away from the archives, remnants of the Sainte-Fontaine colliery stand abandoned, destined to a different fate than the former warehouse that was repurposed to house CAITM’s holdings.

At the derelict mine, signage warns off potential trespassers, locking the ruin away in the strange order of video-surveillance and property management. Another walk away from the archives, a larger abandoned site, Cuvelette, stands in a relative state of dereliction, while a small equestrian centre has set domicile on its perimeter. Some mining sites have been granted the status of heritage sites (museums, archives, or monuments), or may have been re-purposed as leisure parks or commercial entities.

The Sainte-Fontaine mine, which closed in 1986, would reveal to have been particularly dangerous to exploit, exposing workers to constant risks of explosions. Three major accidents in 1919, 1959, and 1961, would lead to the death of 70 workers and numerous casualties. Sainte-Fontaine, however, only represents one of the seven main collieries in the Lorraine region, each of them presenting its own history of work induced casualties and fatalities.

Text and Images © Armelle Skatulski, 2022