Anna Niia Varfolomeeva

Tag: field research

  • Unfolding digital futures

    The surface of the LUMI supercomputer looks like origami. This is a tribute to the paper mill on whose premises LUMI and several other data centres are situated. The UPM Kajaani paper mill was a reliable, long-term local employer in this northern Finnish region until it closed in 2008, leaving more than 500 people unemployed.

    Since 2012, the data centre industry has been occupying the former halls and storage areas of the mill. Its spirit is still felt here: in the deserted railway lines that once carried fresh paper out, in the wooden owl installation gifted to the mill by pupils of the local school, and in the old-fashioned chairs of the former factory café that now hosts data centre workers.

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  • Back to the texts, not yet the fields

    My article on women’s mining labor in Russian Karelia was recently published in Laboratorium journal; the longest I’ve ever spent working on a single text.

    Its first life began in 2018, when I shared an early draft at a workshop on gender and materiality in Aarhus. Later, I reworked it for a special issue on gender, design, and material culture in (post-)Soviet Russia. That work ended abruptly in March 2022, soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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