GMU:Re-enchanting the field/Cosmo Schüppel: Difference between revisions

This research project, develops the concept of a Leerspur. This Leerspur (german: emptx trace) frames this research into the ash mountains of northeastern Estonia as an inquiry into the presence of what is no longer there. 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.

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.

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.