GMU:Re-enchanting the field/Chun Chow

2025-05-02T09:49:01Z

Odie Chow: Created page with "Background I have worked with clay as ceramics materials for some times, but I have little experience in looking into the origin of clay and other minerals. I am curious about how materials are extracted from the lands and what changes are made during the processes. I am most interested in human activities altering the landscape unintentionally. For this course I would like to explore the field by looking into the traces of human activities, remapping and rethink o..."

Background

I have worked with clay as ceramics materials for some times, but I have little experience in looking into the origin of clay and other minerals. I am curious about how materials are extracted from the lands and what changes are made during the processes. I am most interested in human activities altering the landscape unintentionally.

For this course I would like to explore the field by looking into the traces of human activities, remapping and rethink on these changes that represent as a liminal state of the field. The abandoned buildings, ash hills and toxic lakes are the notions of the seemingly temporary and unintentional states of the whole industry of oil shale production, however creating a long term alteration to the environment. These subjects are the evidences of human activities, being inactive in a way because they are abandoned, however also growing because of the active industry, resulting in such liminal states accumulating with a pace slower than the decaying process.

Methods

I want to take these residues accumulating faster than decaying as the notions of liminality in human activities. In response to this, I want to use the two ways I am familiar the most, clay materials and photography, as the methods of reconnecting the seemingly frozen conditions of the slow growth of inorganic matters.

I have never tried using both clay materials and photography together in my works, but I want to try this because I can see the potential of the two media working as a conversation to the intriguing landscapes. I am not really sure about what to do with it, but possible methods are using ash and limestones in the field as clay materials and making prints of photos, using clay materials as chemicals to develop photos or using both media as archiving methods during the field research.

GMU:Re-enchanting the field

2025-04-11T10:50:31Z

Odie Chow: /* METHODOLOGY & TASKS */

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|/Odie 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

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GMU:Re-enchanting the field/Chun Chow

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