Future ruins: A visual itinerary through extractive temporalities in Sofala and Cabo Delgado

In this paper we propose a joint interrogation on the temporality of ruins, a speculation around what Lynn Meskell once called ‘a future in ruins’: what becomes recognizeable, valued and therefore in need of preservation in anticipation of the unknown future. Here we are interested in exploring how (and what) ruins carry temporal arguments and experiences with them, in the context of one of the most persuasive temporal empires of the present: extractivist developmentalism – an infrastructure, territory, mindset, intervention that not only organizes territory and resources but also mobilizes social relations and experiences of time under the promise of developed, successful futures. This, in short, has been the story of Mozambique in the past decades, where the Eldorado of the coal boom in the early 2000s has been replaced in the last decade with the Eldorados of LNG, hydrocarbons and the energy transition. What kinds of ruins emerge from extractivism? And what ideologies and narratives of the future do such ruins embody? In response, we argue that, more than mere vestiges of the past, ruins are deeply embedded with perceptions and configurations of the future among those who co-habitate with them. To demonstrate this, we invoke two recent fieldwork experiences carried out in Mozambique in the framework of past and present extractive histories: in Sofala in the framework of the colonial Companhia do Buzi (CdB)’s ruined architectures, which shape and determine present and future fields of possibility; and in Cabo Delgado in the new graphite mining projects in Balama, where we detect emerging ruins in the framework of the relations between mining projects and affected communities. Since we are particularly interested in new methodologies to explore the visual, material and topographic dimensions of this exercise, we will rehearse this using photo elicitation.