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== Becoming Afterlife: Becoming an Ash Mountains == | |||
=== Background Information === | |||
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. | |||
=== Main Object / Focus of Fieldwork === | |||
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. | |||
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. | |||
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. | |||
=== 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 === | |||
# Derrida, Jacques. (1994) Spectres of Marx. Routledge. | |||
# Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press. | |||
# Gordon, A. F. (2008). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press. | |||
# Latour, B. (2004). Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Harvard University Press. | |||
# Hetherington, K. (2013). “Waiting for a railway: Regenerating material infrastructures in the ‘Ruins’ of the British coal industry.” Cultural Geographies, 20(4), 507–522. | |||
# Davies, T. (2019). Slow Violence and Toxic Geographies: ‘Out of Sight’ to Who? Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 37(6), 1028–1046. | |||
# Fisher, Mark. (2014) Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books. | |||
# Comtesse, Hannah, Verena Ertl, Sophie MC Hengst, Rita Rosner, and Geert E. Smid. (2021) “Ecological grief as a response to environmental change: a mental health risk or functional response?.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 2: 734. | |||