Matthias Van Dromme KUPA-PITI: WHITE MAN IN A HOLE

When Belgian photographer Matthias Van Dromme first heard about the South Australian town Coober Pedy, he was drawn to its residents, whom he describes as “fortuneseekers living in their own dugout mine, like cavemen, building their homes.”

In Coober Pedy, known as the opal capital of the world, many of the residents live in these dugouts. The way they live, called kupa-piti by the Aboriginals—which translates literally as “white man in a hole”—shelters them from the blazing desert heat while they work in mines procuring the precious gemstones.

The barren landscape has attracted many filmmakers over the years: Parts of the 1991 sci-fi flick Until the End of the World and 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome were filmed in the area.

But Van Dromme was fascinated by how people could live in this primitive way while much of the world was reaching a technological apex. Once he arrived there, his project took on a more philosophical bent: “I had the impression that these people are trying to escape something, that the mine is a retreat that is detached from reality,” he says.

Considering kupa-piti as a metaphor for the absurdity of the human predicament, he shot environmental portraits and the interiors of the cave homes, evoking the rawness of humans living within the clutches of the rocks, grasping for wealth, and the “extreme banality” that accompanies this lifestyle.

In his artist statement, Van Dromme references the myth of Sisyphus, forever rolling his boulder upwards. “Is the goal of finding these stones inherently meaningless?” he asks. Or, we could consider philosopher Albert Camus’s notion that “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

—Lindsay Comstock

Photos © Matthias Van Dromme