FORGETTING THE FACTORY THE ERASURE OF EUROPE’S LARGEST ASBESTOS MINING SITE

The factory has always been there, right before our eyes. Ghost-like, facing the open sea of Cap Corse. It was the largest asbestos mining site in Europe. A concrete monster born of the post-war years, inseparable from the landscape — so merged with the cliffs that the two became one.

Its brutal beauty — grey, stepped façades rising out of the mountain — fills the eye as powerfully as the blue, majestic coastline of the Gulf of Saint-Florent.

In this still-wild corner of Corsica, the factory is everywhere: in people’s stories, in the homes and buildings of the village of Canari, in the tally of those who have died, in every sweeping view of the land. But it is a taboo story, because it is an ambivalent one. It gave work. It brought death.

In 2026, sixty years after its closure, the factory will be entirely destroyed. A world first: no asbestos site of this scale has ever been dismantled. The operation is colossal and high-risk. How can the machines travel the Cape’s winding roads? How can the inhabitants be protected? And what is to be done with this painful memory?

As the mechanical jaws finish devouring the façade, the stories emerge. They rebuild the mental image of the factory and its indelible imprint.

They speak of a visceral, paradoxical attachment to a landscape of the Anthropocene.

But once the factory has been completely erased, what story will the next generation tell? And in what identity will they recognise themselves?