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| == Becoming Afterlife: Becoming an Ash Mountains == | | == Hollow traces amidst the becoming of an ecological afterlife == |
| | The concept of the ''Leerspur''—a hollow trace—frames this research into the ash mountains of northeastern Estonia as an inquiry into the presence of what is no longer there. These tuhamäed—ash mountains—born from decades of oil shale mining and combustion, stand not only as residues of Soviet industrial extraction but as forms shaped by absence: the absence of ecosystems, of geological integrity, of human occupation. Yet, these absences are not voids—they are active forms. In their hollowness, they articulate a material afterlife. |
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| === Background Information ===
| | Leerspuren are not remnants in the nostalgic sense, but ontological surfaces of withdrawal—forms left behind when bodies, functions, or meanings recede. They evoke what Heidegger calls ''Dasein’s openness to absence'', what Benjamin sees in the aura of the trace, and what Deleuze, Braidotti, and Ingold describe as ''becoming'' without closure. The tuhamäed embody this tension: they are incomplete, not fully dead, not yet fully alive. |
| The concept of becoming speaks to processes that are never fixed—transformations without final form, always in motion. In the ash mountains of northeastern Estonia, becoming takes shape through the slow shifts of matter, chemistry, and time. These formations, or tuhamäed, are man-made geological bodies born of decades of oil shale mining and combustion. As physical residue of Estonia’s energy economy—particularly shaped under Soviet industrial policies—they mark a period of intensive extraction that treated the earth as a reserve of instrumental value. But their story doesn’t end with abandonment. These mountains persist, hosting subtle, ongoing processes—oxidation, leaching, efflorescence—that continue long after industrial operations have ceased. This is their afterlife: a material existence that lingers, not as inert waste, but as active terrain. They resist easy classification as either nature or ruin, instead occupying a spectral position between presence and absence, breakdown and reformation. In this way, the ash mountains complicate linear ideas of industrial progress and ecological recovery. They are not relics, but sites of material negotiation—unfolding slowly, beyond human tempo, in a language not fully ours.
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| === Main Object / Focus of Fieldwork ===
| | Rather than classifying them as either nature or ruin, this research approaches the ash mountains as zones of indeterminate presence, where ongoing chemical processes—oxidation, leaching, slow disintegration—mark a form of ''Afterlife''. These processes do not restore but transform; the land is not reborn but becomes something else through slow erasure. The ''Leerspur'' here is not what is left ''behind'', but what lingers through absence. |
| This fieldwork focuses on the ash mountains of northeastern Estonia as sites of material becoming and industrial afterlife. These formations are more than remnants of oil shale extraction—they are terrains in transition, shaped by ongoing chemical processes, shifting surfaces, and atmospheric conditions. The work approaches them not as static objects to be studied, but as active participants in a slow and uncertain unfolding. Their scale invites a wide visual register, yet their transformation happens incrementally, often at a pace or scale that escapes the human eye. This tension—between presence and imperceptibility, monumentality and subtle change—sits at the heart of the research.
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| By tracing how these mountains persist and change, the project aims to think through what it means for matter to have an afterlife. What forms of knowledge, attention, and narrative are appropriate to a place that is neither clearly alive nor fully dead? How do we encounter a landscape that resists resolution, that doesn’t offer closure, and that continues to act long after its intended purpose has ended? The ash mountains invite such questions, as they quietly erode, leach minerals, host microbial life, and reflect the industrial systems that shaped them without being reducible to those histories. They are, in a sense, incomplete.
| | === '''Field Focus''' === |
| | This fieldwork engages with the ash mountains as landscapes of Leerspuren—material absences that speak through their silence. These are not passive remains, but expressive voids: collapsed surfaces, corroded layers, unstable gradients. Their form resists human scale; their transformation exceeds human tempo. The work resists interpreting them as static objects or environmental failures—instead, it listens to how absence shapes presence. |
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| The fieldwork will be grounded in site-based observation and sensory engagement—walking, watching, listening. It will use tools like video, sound, and text not to capture the mountains definitively, but to document moments of contact and distance, to register what is felt, seen, or missed. In doing so, the work stays open to multiple modes of interpretation: material, affective, speculative. The ash mountains are not approached as objects of study, but as shifting surfaces through which relationships between human and non-human, history and transformation, may be glimpsed, however briefly.
| | Through walking, filming, and listening, the research attends to the mountains not as bodies, but as hollow relational forms—spatialized memory without resolution. The tools of fieldwork—camera, sound, text—are used not to capture but to trace the imperceptible: what has gone, what lingers, what emerges. In this way, the work stays attuned to a poetics of absence, a material epistemology rooted in what is no longer visible but still acts. |
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| | The ''Leerspur'' becomes a method of perceiving: of sensing the afterlife of extraction, of recognizing transformation not as growth, but as slow dispersal. The ash mountains invite us to think not in terms of recovery, but in terms of unfinished disappearance—as landscapes that remember not through what they contain, but through what they no longer hold. |
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| === Technical Description === | | === Technical Description === |
