It was an early October day – an exceptionally sunny and warm one, especially for Luxembourg. Trees were still green with leaves, and rays of sun filtered through them as we drove down the road to the little village of Lasauvage, a border town in the south of the country. In the car there were four of us, all friends: two Luxembourgers and two foreigners – three architecture students and one student of philosophy. We were driving to a place none of us had ever visited before. But what drew us to Lasauvage?
Two weeks prior, when the topic of the design studio was first announced to us and when Christine, Cornelis and I formed a team, none of us had the slightest idea of where to take it. “Worlding Soils”. We knew very little about soil, and even less about how to “world” it. The only real guidance from our instructors Marija, César and David was to go out there and explore the terrain of Luxembourg, paying close attention to its ground.
We began thinking of what soil is comprised of – flora and fauna, minerals, dead and live matter. The material darkness that is, largely, still beyond our understanding. But what if there was another component, less visible and yet more comprehensible to the mind of a human – stories? What if soil were comprised of stories, woven into its mysterious fabric like phantom threads, binding meanings and matter together?
When our friend, a local, told a story of a savage witch who had been crushed by a giant stone in a nearby village and whose soul still haunted the place, we ventured to see the village and the famous stone with our own eyes. That’s what has brought us to Lasauvage. We were quickly enchanted by its medieval ruins drowned in lush greenery, by the birthday party in the municipal park – so unlike grey and stern Belval we’ve grown used to. We continued our stroll up the hill to the forest.
As this town bears the name of a spirit that haunts it, the boundaries between separate entities in the story we are going to tell are blurry. “Lasauvage” is both the witch and the stone that crushed her, the forest and the river, the little village and its people. After some time searching for “The stone that crushed the savage woman”, we realised it was under our noses all along, not far from where we had parked the car. Truly, sometimes things can be so near to us that we fail to notice them – so close, they simply fall out of focus. Our own environment, the earth on which we stand, has been too close to us for a long time; we rarely pay attention to it or acknowledge its existence.
In the Minett, local traditions, landscapes and mindsets have long been shaped by the presence of the iron industry, and the red earth on which this community evolved carries the imprints and consequences of the country’s economic and political choices. These devastated landscapes testify to the fact that “progress” is so often achieved at the cost of social and environmental damage. This legacy of material violence and injustice is why it is so important to study and learn from the history of our mining region.
But Christine, Cornelis and I had no wish to look into this history through the technicalities of soil itself. Instead, we approached it through what we know most intimately: human bodies and minds. Because in a world of earthly metabolism, everything is connected – and the bodies of people become living, walking archives of their land.
As we continued our walk in Lasauvage, our eyes lingered on a beautiful neo-Gothic church and its stained-glass windows lit by the soft autumnal light. – Hey! Look up there! – What? – Do you see that woman, the statue up on the tower? – What is that in her hand, a hammer? The Lasauvage church appeared to be under the protection of a strange patron yet unknown to us. The Lady of the Miners, a woman equipped with miner’s tools gave this church its name: Église Sainte-Barbe. This is how we uncovered the legacy of Saint Barbara – a mystical virgin who acted as a patron saint of the miners and a symbol of care for industrial workers’ communities in the Minett.
During the 19th-century industrial boom, mining in Europe became more intense and thus more dangerous than ever. The need for protection grew greater and the greeting “Gléck op” that Luxembourgish miners used among each other no longer sufficed. When a miner saw a casket with his dead comrades being carried to a morgue by his fellow miners or when an ambulance delivered someone critically injured in town, he would be overcome by a primordial fear, a realisation of how much his fate depended on… God.
Rumelange pastor Michel Ernst, who took office in 1875, worked to introduce and spread the cult of Barbara to offer solace to his mining community. Today you can see the replica of the first statue of St. Barbara in the Rumelange church. The cult spread all around the Minett ore basins – every village with a mine had a St Barbara sculpture at the mine’s entrance and sometimes a St Barbara chapel and every such village celebrated 4th December as St Barbara’s Day.
On this holiday of Bärbelendag, miners usually had a day off to celebrate. They led a procession through their towns in their best Sunday clothes, held a church mass for deceased colleagues, then gathered at the town hall in the evening for a local party. It was a rare chance for the underground workers to claim the city and enjoy the light of the December sun with their fellow friends.
Mine owners across Minett, who were aware of workers’ superstition, actively supported her cult: they sponsored the December celebrations, funded the sculptures at pit entrances and encouraged the pastors who spread her gospel through the region’s parishes. The support is easily explained – a miner who entrusted his fate to Saint Barbara was a miner who came back to work the next morning.
But – we thought to ourselves – the contrast could not have been starker. Eternally feminine, Saint Barbara was everything the male mine worker was not: luminous where he was dark, pure where he was soiled, serene where he was exhausted, eternal where he was fragile. He descended each morning into the earth’s body – into its heat, its dust, its indifferent darkness – where she waited at the threshold, immaculate and still. Perhaps that was the point. A faith built on such a contrast does not only offer comfort – it also makes danger and suffering seem justified, even noble. The more luminous the protector, the less visible what she was protecting against became. It is that shadow – the worn bodies, the damaged lungs, the lives slowly given back to the earth – that we felt compelled to look at. A bodily archive of exhaustion.
Throughout the 20th century, so many dangers loomed over the miner’s daily labour. Unstable mine structures, toxic gases, the constant threat of explosion – and yet, inadequate safety measures and the absence of proper gear meant that danger was met largely unprotected. The miner grappled not only with the physical exhaustion of extracting the red earth’s riches, but with their mortal cost: fractured bones, crushed lungs, haemorrhage, amputated legs, burnt skin, gas poisoning…
Work injuries aside, we discovered hundreds of reports of violence and suicide among miners. The economic inequalities generated by extractive industry bred resentment, desperation and crime. The earth’s riches did not flow equally; those closely involved with the mining had considerably higher incomes. Unfortunate, discriminated and poverty-stricken perpetrators would often band together and track the miner on the day he received his salary, then attack him with an unfair advantage.
Surely, with pure luck or divine protection, a miner might escape an accident or a sudden explosion. Yet no man could escape the slower murderer: the dust. People have long known that dust damages the lungs, but before industrialisation, mining was never intense enough to cause such irreparable harm. With mechanisation, that changed. Silicosis became one of the most symbolic diseases of progress.
In the early 20th century, medical professionals and industry representatives discredited the knowledge about “black lung” – with such success that the disease was not officially recognised. Some mine owners went further, maintaining that breathing coal dust was beneficial to one’s health. It took miners’ unions and social medicine activists decades of pressure to force acknowledgement and compensation. But for most victims it came too late: by the time silicosis was recognised as an occupational disease, Luxembourg’s industry was already in decline and many had died of it in the meantime, uncured.
The workers who tore the earth’s “jealously guarded riches” from its depths were, in turn, consumed by the same fate. Exhausted, drained, and poisoned, just like the land they struggled against, they perished before seeing the prosperity they had strived for. The extracted soil of the Minett seeped into its people’s bodies through the air, contaminated their lungs. The earth did not stay outside of them; it entered and transformed them.
If you want a morale to this tale: beware the earthly metabolism. This process is real and it transcends the physical realm, it enters various dimensions of our lives, shaping our beliefs and our very psyche. Every breath we take, every piece of food we consume, every ditch we dig and every prayer we whisper binds us intimately with the affected air, water, and earth that surrounds and nurtures us. They return again and again to haunt us.
But of course, we like to think that things have changed. That we are better protected now, more removed from such raw, intense entanglement with the ground beneath us. And yet! How much do you know about the soil your food is grown in? The air moving through your lungs right now? The chemical compounds in the water from your tap? The metabolic tales of the Minett have not ended with the closure of the factories. They are still being written by our own bodies today.