FENCE premiered at Lyric Center For the Arts (Virginia, MN), Sept 2022

There are many fences and barriers around the Mesabi Iron Range where I grew up. I encounter them around active mining and around pit lakes (abandoned open pit mines that have now filled with spring or rain water). The fences that keep people out are the same fences that keep people in contained areas. All of these open pit mines were once habitat for animals and humans alike. Many mining locations were built for workers and later destroyed - the same companies that invited the (mostly immigrant) workers to settle also forced them to vacate in order to mine under what was once home. These fences serve as a reminder of who we are told holds power, what land is ours to love and what land has been used and discarded. How can we reframe our relationship with this landscape and the history and values that altered it? How can we see it as a part of us, our health and survival so closely linked with its health and survival?

‘When gold is in the mountain
and we’ve ravaged the depths
till we’ve given up digging,
It will be brought forth into day
by the river that mines
the silences of stone.’

Bass bow on barbed wire fence recorded with contact microphones. Combined with voice, hardanger d’amore and rocks collected from Hull Rust Mine in Hibbing, MN.
Watch process video.

Text by Rainer Maria Rilke from Book of Hours, translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
Composition, field recording, and video / Sara Pajunen
Hardanger d’amore, voice / Sara Pajunen
Mixed by Robert Soma-Lewis at Ambient Works