Western Deep

Caribs’ Leap / Western Deep comprises two complementary films that are shown together as a three-screen, synchronised colour video projection. The films were originally commissioned for the Documenta 11 exhibition in Kassel, Germany in 2002. They were then screened in London by Artangel in the former Lumiere Cinema on St Martins Lane in the autumn of that same year. Western Deep was filmed in the deepest gold mines in the world, the TauTona mines in the Witwatersrand Reef near Johannesburg in South Africa. Three and a half kilometres underground, the mines represent the deepest anyone has been into the core of the Earth. Working at such deep levels has serious and potentially dangerous consequences for the miners. The temperature can read seventy degrees Celsius. In the deepest parts of the mines the pressure above the miners is 9,500 tonnes per metre squared, or approximately 920 times normal atmospheric pressure. The film follows the miners as they descend into the mines in industrial lifts, and conveys the darkness and claustrophobia of the shafts as well as the dust and the noise in such confined spaces. One of the most striking things about the installation, however, is the sound. Art critic Thomas McEvilley has described the experience of watching the film: Enormous jarring sounds of mechanical equipment and metallic screeching and crashing accompanied the descent into darkness, with occasional flashing lights offering glimpses of the miners as they descended ever farther, getting out of the lift at its occasional subterranean stops. The message seemed to be that labour in a capitalist society is a hell of exploitation and humiliation. (McEvilley 2002, link accessed 17 April 2012.) The Western Deep mines have been functioning under the same management since apartheid. In the depths of the mine the predominantly black miners are shown performing supervised exercises, stepping up and down as red buzzers blare above their heads. Some of them can barely move. The blank and staring faces of the miners and their apparent impassivity to their inhospitable working environment suggest that they are rehearsing their own deaths and interments