SPARTA premiered at the New England Conservatory (Boston), November 2019

SPARTA was made for my grandmother Selma, who died unexpectedly and tragically in 1936. She left behind two small boys, my father and uncle, as well as grieving parents, siblings, and generations of descendents. For many years I have been visiting Sparta, a mining location on the Mesabi Iron Range built by mining companies for their workers. Between 2018-2021, through sound and image, I documented the destruction of the boarding house my Finnish immigrant great-grandparents ran for miners - the house where my grandmother was born in 1909.

In a mining location such as Sparta, workers could own the houses, but they could not own the land. To this day, when a mining company wants to mine minerals under houses, the owners are forced to leave if the company owns the mineral rights to the land. In Minnesota, mining companies own hundreds of thousands of acres (source here).

Even in its dilapidation, this house was a sacred space for me, a place to visit as one would a gravesite. Now I can barely find the place of its foundation that I once knew so well: mining gave and mining took away, erasing yet another family history and connection with the earth. Extraction industries such as iron ore mining have long been praised for giving work to impoverished immigrants. It is the story of America, the narrative we have been taught, but these industries and their values have also severed generational connections with land, both here in what we now call the United States and with land in other parts of the world. How does this truncation with our natural worlds shape our ideas of ownership, resource use and environmental stewardship in modern America? And how does it shape our attitudes towards other humans, women, marginalized populations?

Field recording from the Alan Lomax collection, Library of Congress
Composition, field recording, and video / Sara Pajunen
Violin, voice / Sara Pajunen
Lament singing and Finnish text / Emmi Kuittinen