Today the most distinctive peculiarity of the town of Kiruna seems to be the fact that it is actually being moved.

Many are debating on the significance and propriety of this statement, yet the city has gained a great amount of attention and has become the object of speculation due to the ongoing relocation. Raw facts are synthesised by ArkDes director Kieran Long in one sentence in his foreword to Kiruna Forever, the publication that accompanied the omonimous exhibition on show between April 2020 and February 2021 at ArkDes Stockholm: “The city of around 22,000 people is being simultaneously destroyed and rebuilt in order to facilitate business at one of the world’s most important iron ore mines.”

This induced, accelerated movement locates Kiruna into a wider ecological sphere of influence, and moreover can only be explained by adopting a multiscalar understanding and a global perspective. Global Kiruna was also the title of an artistic project by Iwan Baan, Anne Dessing, and Michiel van Iersel featured in the exhibition, focused on the circulation and spread of raw material, from the local extraction to the global distribution and implementation in the construction business. Aerial shots of the extension of the LKAB mine are displayed next to close-up photographs framing repetitive series of train wagons carrying the iron elsewhere, across nations, worldwide.

The discourse on Kiruna’s relocation brings into question its coming to being in the first place; the conception of history, past, present and future imagery, and the very notion of time take on a completely unique meaning in Kiruna.As Carlos Mìnguez Carrasco argues, the successful slogan Kiruna 4-ever that was title to the winning competition project for the new city by White Arkitekter and Ghilardi + Hellsten Arkitekter, brilliantly evokes and plays with Kiruna’s Time as key to its idiosyncratic entity.

The town came from the mine in the first place, and is bound to its rhythmic, mechanical routine. The artificial clock sets an alarm after 1 am every single night, when a controlled, man-made artificial quake takes place. These phenomena, together with the physical presence of LKAB and the mining-induced topography, shape the sensorial landscape of Kiruna, with which inhabitants are acquainted and may find reassuring in some way. “For the community to exist, the ore had to be mined, but for the ore to be mined, the community also had to be torn down”, writes Eric Niva referring to his hometown Malmberget, another mining town in North Sweden and a historical precedent of Kiruna, with respect to the mining-induced ground collapse and consequent relocation. Malmberget’s instability was also reflected in social and human fragility, as testified by Eric Niva’s moving contribution. How could the younger generations cope with the awareness that the soil below their feet was slowly eroding, and their hometown was invisible to the eyes of the main country and rest of the world? Whereas Malmberget’s community hardly survived the relocation and its future was figuratively and to some extent literally swallowed by the Captain’s Pit hole, which split the old town centre in two, Kiruna seems to aim at a forever projection, and has taken upon a destiny somehow disjunct to the mine itself.

A cyclical refrain of chance and necessity is suggestive of this delicate balance. The mine came first, yet the presence of one among the greatest and purest bodies of magnetite traces back to wider geological scales. The elastic notion of time is also found in the recurring saying that refers to the Kiruna landscape as “where the Sami Indigenous People have lived since time immemorial,” evoking the spatial and temporal scales of indigenous heritage and coloniality.