How stone is made to disappear: Notes from Sokndal

In Sokndal, southern Norway, humans have been digging the earth for generations. First for iron, then for ilmenite – mineral, black, heavy ilmenite. Titanium-iron oxide pulled from the mountain’s dark seams to make the whitest of whites..

It was here in Norway that titanium white pigment was invented and stabilised – the alchemy of rock turned into colour. A whiteness, mined from below, spread across the surfaces of the world. A smear of geological time across the skin of modernity. A colour made mineral. . A colour made global.

And so, I arrived at Velferden Scene – the old mining office turned cultural site at Sandbekk – to listen to rock. I stayed in a house in Hauge i Dalane, the nearby town where the workers of the old mine would have lived. The house, now accommodation for Velferden Scene, had belonged to the mine’s former director. Up on the hillside, it overlooked the town, a vantage point that once echoed a social order: management above, labour below.

Hauge i Dalane sits in a soft green spot amongst a shoulder of ancient, magmatic rock. The hills that surround it aren’t especially high, but they are everywhere – tor, ridged, rounded and stony, as if “etched from above”. A landscape where rock is not beneath the surface but always at it. Anorthosite. Norite. Grey, speckled, coarse.

Early in the residency it became clear that it would not be possible to visit the newer mine, opened in the 60s, where ilmenite continues to be extracted. Instead, I walked (sometimes ran) the old and new paths that lead through the hills of Sokndal, through Sandbekk, the old mine, and close to Tellenes by Jøssingfjord, where the new mine is located. What follows are notes from a landscape shaped by extraction.

From Sandbekk I headed upwards, past the old mine entrances. Most were shuttered and locked – steel bolted across the openings, faded warning signs (I guessed).

I squeezed around a metal fence to get closer to one tunnel that still seemed open. The air changed immediately – cooler, iron-tinged. It felt like some kind of portal, to where I was not sure.

Beyond the tunnel entrance, the track became subsumed by a small mountain of sand. The tailings from the mine. In places near the top, I could see twisted limbs of metal sticking out of the sand like strange old, weathered trees. Sand slowly shifting, the body of the mine still moves here.

I squeezed back around the fence and continued upwards along the main track. A burn ran beside me, stained rusted iron. The water moved slowly, heavily. Along its path, small structures interrupted the flow – weirs, pipes, catchments. All part of some system of control. The infrastructure seemed still half-working, half-abandoned. Partial attempts to hold or manage what still leaks. The water was a system now in uneasy relation with the waste. In places, I saw the remains of wooden-barrelled pipes. Once, I guessed, they must have carried water for the mine. Now they held only air.

Further on I reached more tailings – deposits from the old mine, spread wide like enormous dunes covering the hillside. A dunescape. Now, it felt like I had portaled.

At the foot of the slope, bright orange fragments littered the sand – broken clay pigeons from the shooting range now layered over the tailings. On the higher slopes, plantations of conifers had been planted. The sand now carpeted in moss.

I kept thinking: the tailings here form one covering; elsewhere, titanium dioxide from ilmenite becomes another – laid down as pigment, as paint, as sheen. A white skin drawn over surfaces, bright with the labour of erasure.

But do the coverings erase? The materials below persist, press upward. The tailings shift. The paint flakes. The seepage threads through soil and water.

A double covering. A double failure to contain.

I thought about an art project by Katrina Palmer, The Loss Adjusters, a piece that explores the stone quarries of the isle of Portland, UK. A fictional organisation attempts to quantify and recuperate the loss caused by removing the stone.

I couldn't see inside the mines where rock had been extracted. But here, above them, something felt moved out of place. Not just the stone, but time, presence, sense. A kind of displacement that hadn’t quite resolved. A new kind of ecology was emerging both because of and despite the mining company.

I have gotten into the habit of saying hello to plants. Not every plant. Plants that I might not have seen in a while – the first snowdrop as winter accommodates. Or, perhaps, a plant I was not expecting to see.

Hello oak, I said. Not aloud but under my breath – a gentle, quiet gesture. I find trees so affecting. Their stature, presence. Their embrace.

Oak moves me. Moves me to stop and say ‘hello’. To pause and observe for a moment. To dwell under their canopy.

I stopped to catch my breath and thought what’s in a name?

I think of British nature writer Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure, a candid account of his recovery from depression, and how attending to the more-than-human world was part of that process. This book has stayed with me.

He writes, “It seems to be a basic human reaction, the first step in beginning a relationship: ‘What’s your name?”

For Mabey, knowing a name is the first step in a potential friendship. A greeting. A gesture that opens the possibility for further relation.

He continues, “It seems to me that naming a plant, and for that matter any living thing, is a gesture of respect towards its individuality, its distinction from the generalised green blur. It is, in a way, exactly a gesture: as natural and clarifying as pointing.”

Knowing a name, as Mabey suggests, opens the way perhaps towards some kind of intimacy.

For me, saying a name creates a shift in focus.

But names can be elusive, multitudinous, opaque.

Naming, while intimate, also carries a history.

Human drives to classify and categorise have not been neutral. The Linnaean system that orders the living world into genus and species was born alongside projects of empire, extraction, enclosure. Naming as a means of possession. A grid laid over the earth.

In this history, to name was not only to know, but to claim. To fix a being’s place – and in doing so, make it available: to study, to harvest, to control. As Banu Subramamiam warns, “While the Linnaean system might seem simple in its binomial formulation, it was anything but. Its imagination and structures were fuelled by powerful ideas about colonialisms, race, gender, sexuality, and nation.”

Still, despite this weight, there remains something about the simple, faltering act of greeting – ‘Hello oak’ – that feels like a movement in another direction. An offering of attention without expectation, aware of nomenclature’s non-innocence.

Perhaps instead, my greeting should become a rendition.

Hello thick, ridged lichen-covered trunk with branches large and twisting outward and upward. Hello lobbed leaves, tarnished and folded by winter, still bronzing the soil beneath my feet.

The day I arrived, Maiken collected me from the train in her electric car. We talked about language, similar words found in Scots and Norwegian. Maiken told me about the landscape as we drove along the road. Rocks similar to those on the moon. A topography etched from above. A coastline with no tide.

“Here we are,” Maiken informed me after thirty minutes, “Sokndal and Hauge i Dalane”. A place with two names. “They can’t make up their minds”, she joked.

Two names, I thought. Two ways of being known. Maybe more.

In the house where I stayed, each day at mealtimes, I found myself taking down a lump of ilmenite from above the fireplace – a dark, heavy ore, mined locally – and placing it across from me at the table.

Hello ilmenite

I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing. It started as a playful habit, but it grew into something else – a slow, strange kind of recognition.

If saying ‘oak’ made room for pause, saying ‘ilmenite’ began to open a different kind of attention – heavier, denser, mineral time. Ilmenite, this dark mineral, infused with ancient energy, was not only a specimen, not only an economic resource. It was a condensation of time: geological, human, industrial.

Sometimes, however, clarity in naming is needed. A name without hesitancy, uncertainty, or double. There are deep, material consequences when we can’t collectively name something. There are moments when the right name must be spoken plainly – when lives and living depend on it.

To name land as stolen.

To name the deliberate and systematic killing of people.

Genocide.

In these moments, naming is not a gesture of politeness. It is a reckoning.

But still, I think there is something vital, too, in those quieter gestures – the faltering attempt to notice, to reach across differences without trying to own.

In the hills above the old mine, my hands sought out old rock to hold. I wanted to see if I could see the new mine from over there from across here. I headed upwards.

I climb sometimes. Not well. But enough to know that my body carries a certain way of reading stone. Against the heroics of climbing, I find this more useful: a way of coming into relation with rock that is not conquest, not summit.

Without meaning to, my body begins its old pattern. Facing a wall of stone – any wall, any angle – I find my eyes searching for features. A ripple. A break. A seam that might take weight. Fingers moving before thought. My whole body engages, practises the moves before I move.

Nan Shepherd wrote of something like this. Her ways of being with the mountain. The slow knowing. Not over or beyond but in and along.

I thought of the miners in the old mine. The drills pushed into the seams of ilmenite. A different kind of noticing. Theirs shaped by repetition, precision, the sound of metal meeting stone. But still: hands attuned. A feel for when the rock would give. For where the seam would open.

I wondered how those hands moved when not working. If their touch remembered the stone.

My neighbour Odd invited me to join him and the local walking group on their weekly trip. Odd works at the Tellenes mine in the ore processing plant. He grew up in the area.

The walk began at the sea end of Jøssingfjord. We headed up through a small village – now mainly holiday homes, I’m told – and over the top of the hill, down towards the coast. First through damp conifer and moss, then rocky track, rowan and birches. Old farms also converted into second homes. A few sheep kept the grass roundabout in check.

While we walked, I asked Odd about the mine. He tells me there has been mining in this area for hundreds of years, first for iron, now for titanium. Clay was also extracted here once. Although it was of poor quality, Odd believed it was still used for porcelain. In the current mine, he tells me “there is lots of resource left”. I tried to picture the new mine, having only seen it in photographs on the internet and framed in the house where I stayed.

Two hundred and fifty metres deep. An open pit several kilometres long.

I tried to imagine the absence/erosion that has been made to give other materials so much presence/preservence. I can’t, not quite.

Down the hill towards the sea, we passed through the site of a German settlement from the second world war. Greening concrete slumping against the earth. The cold, dark spaces seemed uninhabitable.

At the shoreline, we stop for lunch, and I scramble down to the sea and plunge my face into the cold salty water. Face dripping, I walked back up the shore to the group. While the group ate, someone had begun to tell a story. I listened for a bit to see if I could understand anything. I opened Google Translate on my phone, hoping to catch something in translation. Intelligible fragments popped up on the screen, white letters against a black background. A king perhaps, something gruesome happened.

After the story, we headed around the coast and back over the headland through another small village, also mainly second homes, all painted white. Along the side of the road in the ditch, ramsons grew. A few of us picked them as we passed, stuffing handfuls into our pockets, the bright green scent rising through our clothes, the smell staining my fingers.

After the walk, we all headed along the fjord to the Jøssingfjord science museum for something to drink – a modern building, somehow both surprising and fitting the landscape around it. From the window of the museum cafe, I looked out across a piece of reclaimed land. Under the cliffs at the other side, two small wooden houses sit tucked below the rock. Odd told me he is related to the families that once lived there. Today, they are part of the museum. It is believed that folk have been seeking shelter under the immense cliff for thousands of years.

In the carpark, as we headed back to Odd’s car, we passed through two stone pillars. At first unassuming. I hadn’t noticed them on the way in. Up close, they shimmer – black and faintly metallic, like damp coal. They are made of ilmenite. Odd stopped as we passed through them this time and told me that they once were situated back in the town of Sokndal. The pillars marked a boundary in the town between the workers and the management. This time, when I passed through them, I felt something shift in my chest – not grief, not anger, something slower.

We drive home through the folds of the hills. I thought about the many transformations ilmenite goes through.

I placed a piece of ilmenite in my mouth and tried to sing.

The stone tasted of nothing at first. Then of dust. Of loosened metal. Cold, but not cold like ice – cold like the absence in a cave.

I stood alone in the kitchen. The ilmenite lump pressed against my tongue. I tried again. A note emerged, broken at first, thin. Then fuller. The stone began to warm.

I wondered if the seam beneath Sandbekk mine felt this heat – the warmth of bodies above it, walking, singing (did they sing?), grinding, erasing.

At the new mine, Odd had said there was lots of resource left.

In my mouth, the resource was finite. My jaw ached. My throat tightened. I spat the stone out into my palm. It sat there, wet, unchanged, coated in my saliva.

Machines could work it longer. My body could not.

I tried to hum again. The tone clearer now. But not quite restored.

The lump sat on the table beside me, still, wet, darkly iridescent.

I thought of the pillars at the museum. Workers / management. A line cut into lives. Those following seams of rock. Others, flows of product markets.

The stone had left its trace. My mouth could not quite find the note.

We parked high above Jøssingfjord. The stone here is pale, grey, dense – anorthosite – slow to weather. The fjord below is not typical for this area, where the rock generally resisted the flows of ice and water into valleys. It appears still almost as if the magma had just recently cooled, bubbling, running, rounded.

Odd led the way. Across the road, a small thicket of birch and alder, blackened by wildfire. The trunks splinter and lean. Char still flakes from the bark, brittle under hand. We looked for faint blue paint on the stone. It seemed not many had walked this way recently.

Odd paused beside the rock face. He pointed to a deep gouge and potmarks: traces of a subglacial river, immense forces once moving through stone. Water shaping what now seems unmoving. The eye struggles to hold such scale. In one potmark, I slipped my hand into the brownish, rusted water that had gathered, made a fist and rotated my hand. My knuckles grated against the coarse rock.

Further up, we find a small dark pool. Once, Odd counted a hundred salamanders here. On this day, pausing briefly, we saw only a few.

Beyond the tumble of birch and alder, our path winded upwards. We scrambled higher, reaching the plateau. Rock, heather and grasses under foot. The odd thin, gnarly birch. A forest of small rocks and boulders. The thinnest of soil clings on. Far off, wind turbines turn against the sky. "I’m not keen on them," Odd tells me. Somehow, to me, they didn’t seem so out of place.

From a ledge we stopped and looked down. The winding road below making its way to the valley floor and along the edge of the fjord. We could see across to the building where Odd works at the other side of the valley above the fjord. Where ilmenite ore from the mine is processed and dried before being shipped out across the world.

130 tonnes of ilmenite ore processed per hour. (Eight hours to wake the plant. Eight to let it sleep again. It runs nonstop.) I tried to hold the number, but it escaped me.

Ilmenite is mined for its titanium dioxide to make a pigment that coats surfaces unseen. Paints, plastics, paper, cosmetics, the whiteness of modern life. Titanium dioxide gives the shimmer, the opacity. It is a material of surfaces, of appearances. It vanishes into the everyday.

Odd spoke of the reservoir by the plant. He used to watch beavers there, but sediment built up from the processing work and the reservoir had to be drained. The beavers have gone. Odd hopes they will return.

Absences accumulated. Tree, rock, salamander, beaver.

We moved down over broad rock slabs, walking steep angles held firm by coarse grained, crystalline stone. Perhaps deep beneath our feet a seam of black running ilmenite.

Walking here, this is what I cannot forget. How stone is made to disappear – crushed, extracted, transformed into gloss.

From close to the valley floor, we headed back upwards through the old road tunnel. The new road tunnel flows adjacent, carved deeper into the rock. The old tunnel has become a place for walkers and visitors to rest, even stay the night. We take a break here. Odd explains how it was made, and points to small holes still visible in the tunnel walls. Chisels were first used, holes driven ten centimetres at a time by hand, before the blades blunted and needed to be replaced. Once deep enough, small charges of dynamite were placed. In the mine, the drills run eighteen metres deep. The digging machines can carry thirty-five tonnes of cracked-up rock per scoop. They travel on tyres with a diameter of three metres.

We walked up through the tunnel, back to the car park. I read the display signs behind Odd's car. Jøssingfjord has other significant human histories. In February 1940, Altmark, a German support ship carrying 300 prisoners of war, escorted by a Norwegian torpedo ship, was boarded by British marines and the prisoners freed. The incident became the pretext for Germany to occupy Norway, having failed to protect the Altmark. The term “jøssing” became an anti-Nazi slogan for all sides.

We climbed a few steps onto a huge slab of rock next to the carpark and looked across the valley. Industry has been here for centuries. Below the processing plant, the old Nedre Helleren power plant, now part of the local science museum. Further along the fjord edge, the site where the ore from the processing plant is transferred onto ships, so heavy they appear half full, Odd told me. The pier reaches out into the water – the point where stone becomes cargo. The alchemy of a dark black rock made global. Above, smoke from the processing plant added whiteness into the sky.

We stepped carefully back across rock that remembers more than we do and returned to Odd’s car. Below us, across the fjord, another tonne of ore passes through unseen.

Against the image of “lone enraptured male” (Kathleen Jamie), I was never walking alone even when by myself. Accompanying me in my carrier bag of fiction/theory: Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology; Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, The Grassling; Mel Y. Chen, Animacies; Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives; Ingrid Halland, The Surface-Process Paradox: On Chemistry, Extraction, and Aesthetics; Richard Mabey, Nature Cure; Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor; Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain; Banu Subramaniam, Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism. I’d like to thank Elham Rahmati and Vidha Saumya (NO NIIN) and Sofie Bakke Ringstad and Heather Jones (CAS) for making the residency possible, and Maiken Stene, Ane, Hans Edward Hammonds, Stian Birkeland and Sindre Husebø for their hospitality (Velferden Scene); to (A) and Y for their thoughtful feedback; and a massive thank you to Odd for the companionship, conversation and walks.