GMU:Re-enchanting the field/Marite Helena Kuus

2025-05-03T09:00:18Z

Mkuus:

I am interested in the ash as a material, what is there to be created from death? We can’t turn back time but we can confront what is left behind and discuss where to go from here. This kind of post-industrial site isn’t an anomaly, in fact this wasteland isn’t even contained to this small area. Waste and toxicity is embedded into our lives, it’s a part of us. Humans until now have not evolved to be able to process this toxicity, we need to protect ourselves from it and try to undo it. Other species are more adaptable and have accepted this new world for what it is. There is an orchid in the oil shale mountains that has adapted to this landscape and is thriving in it. There are worms (larvae of the beetle ''Zophobas morio)'' that eat polystyrene because their gut enzymes can digest the plastic. Heather Davis speaks of the “disruption of boundaries” in the anthropocene, wherein everything is enmeshed: “try as we might to remove ourselves, to maintain a solid division between nature and culture, or the natural and synthetic, everything emerges from and is ultimately folded back into the earth in a fundamentally intra-active process.” (Davis, Heather. Plastic Matter. London, Duke University Press, 2022, p. 10.)

I am also interested in ways of documenting processes. As Felix said in one of our earlier sessions, the graphic design in scientific publications is very specific and often doesn’t leave much room for artistic expression. As a materials based artist, chemical diagrams mean little to me as I am used to interacting directly with matter. How do we document tangible materials in our research in combination with the intangible stories, histories and feelings that are intertwined with the physicality of the location?

As I have a background in textile and curating, I have been considering the nature of tactile experiences and figuring out how to document and publish them. Archives and records tend to keep track of binary information, how to ensure that future archives also contain haptic knowledge?

Other references I will consult during this process include “Erosion: Essays of Undoing” by Terry Tempest Williams (Sarah Crichton Books, 2019) and “Compost Reader” edited by Institute for Postnatural Studies (Cthulhu Books, 2021).

GMU:Re-enchanting the field

2025-04-11T10:46:52Z

Mkuus: /* Participants */

Preparatory Sessions (Online): April 4th, 11th 25th and May 9th 2025
 Field visit, Narva, Estonia (including travel days): 18.5. – 25.5.2025
 Follow up & Project Review (online): June 20th and July 5th 2025

Prof. Ursula Damm, Prof. Kerstin Ergenzinger, Mindaugas Gapševičius (Bauhaus University Weimar)
 Prof. Monika Halkort (University of Applied Arts Vienna)
 Prof. Myriel Milicevic (Potsdam University of Applied Sciences)
 Prof. Kärt Ojavee (Estonian Academy of Arts)

NUMBER OF ECTS AWARDED: 6 (4 SWS)

Topics addressed: energy transitions, extractivism, industrial waste as material witness and driver of (geo)political transformations and change.

== Syllabus ==
* 11.04.2025 [[GMU:Re-enchanting the field/Social & Political History of Oil Shale Production|Social & Political History of Oil Shale Production]]
* 25.04.2025 [[GMU:Re-enchanting the field/The geo-history of oil shale in Estonia|The geo-history of oil shale in Estonia]]

The Chairs of Acoustic Ecologies and Media Environments invite students from Media Art and Design program to apply for a week-long field experiment in Narva, Estonia, near the Russian border. In collaboration with colleagues from the University of Applied Arts Vienna (School for Transformation), the Estonian Academy of Arts (Master of Craft Studies), and Potsdam University of Applied Sciences (Department of Design) we investigate the material legacy of oil shale extraction in the Baltic region, focusing in particular on the historical entanglement of energy, substances, landscapes, and bodies, and their unintended proliferations and designs.

Our main aim is to engage with the emergent properties of bio/geo-chemical waste in their broader geopolitical context and to unpack how they hold landscapes and bodies in colonial relations, long after the mining activities have been shut down.

Oil shales are marine fossils stored in rocks containing kerogen that can be converted into crude oil and gas. The northeast of Estonia is extremely rich in oil shale reserves that have attracted the interest of imperial powers and totalitarian regimes throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The unfettered violence of colonial and capitalist extraction has left behind vast mountains of industrial ash, and polluting materials, that are waiting to be remediated and disposed. The enduring legacy of toxic waste in open dumps next to forests, rivers, and unused agricultural lands has created its own queer ecologies that collectively remake environments in which received boundaries between waste, residue and resource, or regenerative materials are continuously renegotiated, reconfigured and redrawn.

During this 5 day workshop, we want to explore the recurrent cycles of decomposition, death and renewal that are shaping the ambivalent landscapes of extractivism in Estonia, making their queer connections and affinities visible and apparent for critical inquiry and future research. “Queer” in this context does not necessarily describe something that already exists. Rather, queer inaugurates a certain kind of future of intelligibility for beings and collectives who are not yet available for explication. Hence, we consider the shale oil waste dumps as post-natural worlds, traversed by imperial and capitalist relations, whose historically specific modes of (chemo/techno)sociality and untapped potentials we seek to understand.

===METHODOLOGY & TASKS===

Toxicity is a specific genre of harm that describes the (re)ordering of living systems across timeframes and scales. Following Tironi and Liberoin, (p. 336;) it creates shared conditions for what thrives and what is altered, what ‘persist[s] and redistributes[s] ‘ and ‘what is destroyed, injured, and constrained’ both as a premise for other things to thrive (Murphy, 2017: 141–142).

During the one-week residency in Estonia, we trace this reordering of life across the entire life cycle of oil shales - from their site of extraction along the Estonian coastline, to fossil fuel processing plants, all the way to the open waste dumps and riverbeds, where the toxic sludge and the industrial ash are deposited and dumped.

Together with local residents and field guides, we will visit ash mountains, ghost villages and abandoned manufacturing plants, built under Soviet Occupation (1941 – 1991), when oil shale production was at its historical height. Additional insights will be provided by scientific inputs from researchers in biology, geology, and environmental history in preparatory sessions online.

Our main task will be to create a living index of liminal relations that sustain the shale oil ecosystem, mapping how they animate, de/recompose and transform social and natural landscapes, organisms and bodies at different speeds, durations and levels of intensity. Drawing on acoustic sensing, environmental mappings, and elemental ethnography / bio-geochemical analysis, we hope to reveal the less noticeable tensions, collaborations, and attunements that emerge from ‘non-consensual inhabitations’ (Masco) and forced transfers and unpack how they facilitate and/or disrupt land-body relations against a backdrop of shifting geopolitical borders and energy regimes.

===Participants===
Bauhaus Universität Weimar
* [[/Cosmo Schüppel]]
* [[/Jan Munske]]
* [[/Karlotta Sperling]]
* [[/Kitman Yeung]]
* [[/Nina Bendix Igleses]]
* [[/Öykü Türkan]]
* [[/Rieke Hettinger]]
* [[/Sabah Khaled]]

Potsdam University of Applied Sciences
* [[/Marie Buschmann]]
* [[/Laura Günther]]
* [[/Helena Haak]]
* [[/Hannah Charlotte Krause]]
* [[/Ina Kwon]]
* [[/Juliane Müller|/J uli ane Müll er]]
* [[/Jennifer Schnurr]]
* [[/Ragnar Wilczek]]
* [[/Tilmann Finner]]

University of Applied Arts Vienna
* [[/Virginia Nicole Bonareri]]
* [[/Hans-Lionel Cayaban]]
* [[/Helin Ozdemir]]
* [[/Raphaela Leitner]]
* [[/Sara Karimi]]
* [[/Sofia Pechenaia]]
* [[/Yuri Turovskiy|/Yury Turovskiy]]
* [[/Jiun-You Ou]]

Estonian Academy of Arts
* [[/Chun Chow]]
* [[/Marite Helena Kuus|/Marite Kuus]]
* [[/Mariam Mestvirishvili]]
* [[/Hannah Caroline Segerkrantz]]

===OUTCOMES===

The outcome of our material probes and observations will be documented in a shared workbook (digital/online publication) based on group projects conducted in the field.

Participants in this workshop will develop an understanding of bio-chemical processes and relations as critical infrastructures of geopolitical transformations and recognize how socio-ecological change is as much about (re)configuring life and responsibility beyond the individual body (Murphy, 2017, p. 479) as it is premised upon structures of violence and extraction that require land and bodies as sacrifice zones.

===BUDGET===

Participants receive stipends from the Erasmus programme to cover travel expenses.

===ACCOMMODATION===

We will be staying at Narva Art Residency (NART)
*https://www.nart.ee/en/residency/
*https://g.co/kgs/uLm4yKZ
'''Info Sheet Accomodation & Arrtival'''

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DB6yc_PfR_PKR0QnDerWHTY-JDR-xenj?usp=drive_link
===EXPECTATIONS===

Participation in the trip to Estonia 18. -25. May 2025
 Interest in discourse, reading, research as well as hands-on material experiments around anthropocene & feral landscapes, relationality, more-than-human design, interdisciplinary, experimental and poetic approaches, team work
 Documentation and experimental storytelling (transferring findings and relations into visual, sonic, experimental narratives). These narratives will be published on a dedicated course website.

===MATERIALS===
'''Course Materials (all)'''

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1HV75lDkZEHdtrAgx0-7SFfqAEqqGSGdL

'''Social and Cultural History of Oil Shale Production in Estonia (Text)'''

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1rlz26-7diSfn2Mp-YVLSBt_TdLZdldKl?usp=drive_link

'''Environmental Studies (Text)'''

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1yM6MCDSTPJWmKqPqw7r_KL6FQKmc9tjP?usp=drive_link

'''Ecology (Text)'''

*"Ocean earth: 1980 bis heute: 1980 bis heute. Ausstellung Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum im Künstlerhaus Graz, Febr./März 1993"; Peter Weibel, Peter Fend, Thomas Donga Heike Rekampe ISBN 978-3927789722
* "Microhabitable"; Fernando Garcia Dory and Lucia Pietroiusti ISBN 978-3753303864
* "[https://www.diaphanes.net/titel/technologies-of-care-7046 Technologies of Care" by Yvonne Volkart]

'''Methodology'''

* Feral Atlas feralatlas.org

GMU:Re-enchanting the field/Marite Helena Kuus

2025-04-11T10:46:20Z

Mkuus: Created page with "Concept Note. What relational dynamics / transformations do you want to explore?"

Concept Note. What relational dynamics / transformations do you want to explore?

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GMU:Re-enchanting the field/Marite Helena Kuus

GMU:Re-enchanting the field

GMU:Re-enchanting the field/Marite Helena Kuus