Damián Arteca, McGill University and the European Graduate School (EGS)
ABSTRACT
What does it mean to photograph a remainder? Sudbury Ontario, a Northern city responsible for a vast
chunk of the world’s nickel production, has produced a landscape full of distances, absences, and looming
architectures. In this photo essay, I take my hometown of Sudbury as an example of what Phil A. Neel
(2018) dubs Hinterland, that growing desert between urban centers characterized by active (and
abandoned) sites of extraction. Sudbury’s nickel mine remains active, but recent economic decline,
catastrophic cuts to educational funding, and a crippling wave of fentanyl addiction have multiplied the
presence of absence. In this photo essay, I have attempted to photograph the feeling of aesthetic remainder –
whatever is left of a city’s presence when something fundamental has been subtracted. Empty streets. Closed
businesses. The slow creak of a rusty sign. Factories subtracted of workers, looming watertowers
subtracted of water. Occasionally, a freight train wanders south, subtracting a few thousand tons of ore.
It is the remainder of these subtractions that I have hoped to capture.
KEYWORDS
hinterland, anthropocene, ontario, partial object, anthropology, visual ethnography.
