Since Spring, we’ve been mentoring Caimin Walsh, a thoughtful curator based between County Cork and Limerick, Ireland, through a bursary that he was awarded from the Arts Council of Ireland. The dialogue has been flowing and rewarding—we quickly discovered a shared taste for sprawling, tangled research. One project we’ve discussed is Caimin’s careful development of a new artwork by Kerry Guinan, which builds on their visit earlier this year to Kiruna in Northern Sweden with filmmaker Anthony O’Connor. We were somewhat familiar with Kiruna, having worked with Lara Almarcegui on her research into the Tuolluvaara Wasteland for an exhibition at Bildmuseet, Umeå, in 2012. The city is known as the site of one of the world’s largest iron‑ore mines. As extraction has advanced beneath the city, the risks of subsidence have become unbearable, and over recent decades a plan has taken shape: to relocate Kiruna.

Buildings have been dismantled and displaced—the church that once stood across from the spot where Caimin took this photograph was moved earlier this summer—or will be demolished and replaced. Proposals for the new city continue to stir fierce debate. Kiruna would collapse economically without the mine, yet it would literally sink under continued extraction. The transition from Old Kiruna to New Kiruna is a ruthlessly pragmatic and ostensibly impressive solution, yet comes at the cost of social rupture and cultural upheaval. As Kerry and Caimin traverse this unsettled terrain, their work continues to be sensitive to a city suspended between erasure and reinvention.