MILEPOST 7
Audiovisual 5’34”
Outside of Silver Bay, Minnesota USA, is MILEPOST 7, a hidden taconite tailings pond. Over three square miles in size, Milepost 7 began housing waste for taconite operations on the shores of Lake Superior in 1980. Before building the tailings pond, the mining company had been disposing taconite processing waste into Lake Superior for decades, polluting the drinking water of the hundreds of thousands of people who make their homes in the area.
Although monitored inlands tailing ponds are safer than dumping waste tailings into fresh water, the increasingly covert nature of extraction practices around the world is cause for concern. How much of our regional environments are we blocked from accessing? Can that which is hidden come to our attention, and if so how? Considering the danger of these controlled and concealed areas, is a symbiotic and holistic relationship with our surrounding environment possible?
The shape used in the work is the shape of Milepost 7.
