Cartography of Toxic Legacy

By September 2027, a year after delivering this project, the Canadian company Blue Moon Metals intends to start operating the Nussir copper mine in Repparfjord, Northern Norway (Blue Moon Metals, 2026). However, the previous company, Nussir ASA, intended to start operating this mine already close to a decade ago. In 2009, the company began planning to operate the mine by 2018. Since then, environmental activists have managed to push back against Nussir ASA and its mining project, which, apart from producing copper, entails the largest environmental pollution in Norwegian history (NRK Sápmi, 2013). The project’s licence to dump its mining waste into the Fjord was granted in 2016 and allows the release of two million tonnes of mining waste per year (Zero Carbon Mine, 2024). Given that the company intends to run for 13-17 years (Blue Moon Metals, 2026), this quickly adds up to a total of approximately 30 million tonnes of waste that is doomed to ruin an entire ecosystem and the communies connected to it.

Despite the voiced concerns of activists and scientists, the state and companies continue to push their extractive practices against the will of the people, despite over 10 years of resistance. We have reached a critical point in the fight for life in and around Repparfjord, as the title of a strategic project under European Union regulation (European Commission, 2025, p. 69) has opened new avenues for political and financial support. In my essay and dissertation in the accompanying book "Copper is not the New Green", I elaborate on how the act of (re)writing legislation and regulation is used to justify the continuation of past injustices, in this case the greenwashing of neo-colonial mining.

This Research Archive adds to these reflections by examining how and what valuable information about the past conditions of a conflicted area is lost in those accelerated procedures designed by green transition agendas. As much as the green transition frames the Nussir project as a future strategy, this investigation is a deep dive into the archived documentation that has written this mine into existence, already over a decade ago in 1903. Centred around the research question:

How does the change of ownership of the Nussir mine differ and justify its previously contested plans?

I want to take you on a journey through the deep time of Repparfjord’s mines and aim to visualise how shifts in ownership are nested within similar interests and intentions, through patterns in reporting, reuse of infrastructure, and actor involvement.

Challenging the traditional understanding of an archive as a repository of records, the research reads it as a site of power, selection, memory, erasure, and imagination. It questions which histories it tells, whose knowledge is preserved, and which futures live on from it. Moving beyond a static collection, the work rather leans towards a post-colonial/living archive (de la Cadena, 2015, p. 149), contesting its content and generative processes and aiming to activate, reinterpret, and transform the material in relation to a challenging present context.

The data used for this platform currently comprises 183 files, totalling 6510 pages, gathered from various sources: Direktoratet for mineralforvaltning (Directorate of Mining), Hammerfest Municipality Arealplaner (land-use plan), and others. An archive of this size functions, in practice, as an obstacle. The volume of the record protects the parties who produced it. Instead of reading the files page by page, the research maps their distribution over time, their institutional authorship, and their overarching relations across shifting mine ownership. The premise is that the shape of the archive – who wrote, when, on whose behalf – carries an argument that no single document carries alone. Documents on their own, within their published timeframe, are (often) lawful; it is by collecting and reorganising them that patterns appear, of power, of intent, and how they live on in the present. Even though these findings might not provide evidence for legal claims, they teach us something about the danger of disregarding historical records when they continue to define the present and the futures we live in/towards.

the task of the postcolonial archivist is not merely to collect subaltern histories. It is also to investigate the compositional logics of the archive as such: the material conditions that allow something to be archived and archivable.

Elizabeth Povinelli (2011, p. 153), as cited in Mariano, Archive, p. 150

What the platform is not:

• Not a document repository. It links to sources; it does not host them.
• Not a full-text search engine. It indexes metadata, not document contents.
• Not a neutral database. It is an argued assembly of information, and states its authorship.
• Not an accusation. It does not assert wrongdoing. It makes the record visible and critiques it.
• Never finished. As a living archive it is open to correction and contribution.

This work is intended to spark a literacy campaign. It should be clarified that the date that opens this page, September 2027, is not a random activation date; it is a deadline. If operations do not start by then, the operating licence expires (Blue Moon Metals, 2026). Whereas the essays in "Copper is not the New Green" discuss how regulations for the green transition lobby obscure the socio-environmental effects of raw material extraction, the Cartography of Toxic Legacy-tool shows what is obscured: that the Nussir mine is not a new mining project nor a bright prospect for a green future, but rather an expansion and continuity – not only of the infrastructure of previous mining activities, but also of beneficiaries and corporate involvement.

This platform is authored by a Belgian landscape architect as part of their research at the Centre for Research Architecture in London, an EU citizen, working in solidarity with the Repparfjord struggle. It is an invitation to join the movement for socio-ecological justice in and beyond Repparfjord. You can learn more about the cause, as well as of past and running actions, and join the campaign here.

All files and corporate and personal documentation were gathered from publicly available sources and can be checked through their citations.