GMU:Re-enchanting the field/Cosmo Schüppel

Hollow traces amidst the becoming of an ecological afterlife

This research project, develops the concept of a Leerspur. This Leerspur (german: empty 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.

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.

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.

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.

Technical Description

The research will use video and text as primary tools to explore and communicate the ash mountains as ongoing, living landscapes. The visual documentation will aim to echo human sensing—how we see, move through, and physically relate to the environment—while also offering access to materials and movements beyond what the unaided senses can register. Sound recordings will accompany the video to document ambient noise, subtle vibrations, and the acoustic character of the landscape, further grounding the work in sensory experience.

Rather than isolating data or perception, the methods aim to let multiple forms of attention coexist. The tools—whether camera, microphone, or notebook—are chosen not to control the site, but to register and carry traces of its ongoing processes, making space for slow, layered observation. The work unfolds through documentation, sensing, and reflection, tracing the movements and transformations that define the ash mountains as more than static remnants.

The tools used in this research are not intended to produce definitive knowledge about the ash mountains, but to trace the process of coming into contact with them. They serve as markers of an encounter—of searching for a shared ground between human perception and non-human processes. Rather than assuming access or understanding, the methods reflect the possibility of incompatibility, of misalignment, of moments where communication breaks down or becomes ambiguous. This meeting point—between sensing, recording, and not fully grasping—becomes a space of significance in itself. The work acknowledges that these landscapes may remain partially inaccessible, and that the value of the research lies not in resolving that distance, but in dwelling within it.

References (or rather access points, or inspiration...)

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