αὐτόχθονες/autochthon

For the eminent American historian and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford, coalmining both established and epitomised the capitalist exploitation of both land and labour. He described the space of the mine as the first completely ‘manufactured terrain’, an unnatural, inorganic antithesis of the ideal pastoral arcadia. Mining, he argued, was the archetypical site where earth and land were reconceived as being no longer just about growing food but as something more instrumental, something that could be objectively acted or operated upon.

While its damage is undeniable, coalmining has a history that is more complex and nuanced than one might expect.

αὐτόχθονες (autochthon) provides a polemical introduction to some of the themes and concerns of ACME: Architectures of Coal and Modern Europe (2025-2030). This ERC-funded project seeks to identify and understand coal mining’s often overlooked cultural and spatial legacies within Europe by examining the architectures it created to: house and otherwise reproduce the health and bodies of its workers, exchange knowledge and educate its exponents; rationalise and modernise; and the decline and dismantling of this landscape. ACME proposes these territories represent pivotal ‘ecologies’ in the development of twentieth-century Europe’s social landscape (including the welfare state and the foundations of the EU) and collectively realise a buried episteme: the coalscape.

Citation

Gary A. Boyd, “αὐτόχθονες/autochthon,” PLATFORM, Feb. 23, 2026.