GMU:Re-enchanting the field/Kitman Yeung

Final project documentation:

Air Ethnographies: how to sense, belong, and live in Narva

Abstract:

This project investigates how the atmosphere records histories of extraction, displacement, and waste in Narva, Estonia. Through air data, field observations, and speculative photography, it explores how post-industrial landscapes reconfigure.

Context:

The atmosphere is a carrier of memory. When we enter a place, our perception of it changes depending on the stories we hear and the air we breathe. In the post-industrial landscapes of Eastern Estonia, especially in Narva and Kohtla-Järve, the air carries no longer traces of the mined pollutants but of systemic displacement and industrial afterlives.

Following Estonia’s accession to the EU in 2004, stricter environmental regulations prompted major restructuring in its energy sector, which heavily relied on oil shale. As the country regains independence after soviet occupation and their new policies adapt to EU climate goals, many workers, particularly from the Russian-speaking community are exiled from the deflating industry. These workers, once essential, have become what Kesküla (2018) describes as “waste people,” devalued by a shifting economic and ecological regime. Simultaneously, the material waste of oil shale, ash mountains and abandoned industrial infrastructure, has been recast as cultural heritage or aesthetic ruin sites of Estonia tourist industry.

This project responds to these tensions by investigating how air becomes a site of entanglement between extraction and displacement. Drawing from elemental ethnography and discard studies, I ask: how can both embodied, disembodied and speculative data help us sense the less visible remains of resource politics? How do waste infrastructures and atmospheric residues narrate a story of bodies made disposable under transition policies?

Process, Methods and Findings:

This project takes a site-specific and materially engaged approach to investigating the air in Narva and surrounding oil shale landscapes. Using atmospheric sensing as both method and metaphor, I trace how the air intersects with social histories of displacement and industrial decline. I react to ethnography as a qualitative research method focused on immersive observation and participation to understand the lived experiences, practices, and meanings within a cultural or social group.

I aim to study the lived consequences of energy transition through a mixed-method approach. This includes field observations, air quality measurements, sound/smell documentation, and visual records of abandoned and “revalued” sites. The goal is to trace the ways in which atmosphere carries the contradictions of progress: both as toxic residue and as speculative site for renewal.

The base foundation layer of the map comes from the circular chromatography of oil shale ash and soils collected from the post-industrial landscapes of Narva, Estonia. Circular chromatography is a method used to analyze and visualize the chemical composition of substances. A small quantity of each sample was diluted and placed at the center of circular filter paper, where it was drawn outward by a solvent through capillary action. As the solution spread, various compounds within the ash and soil separated and revealed themselves as rings, stains, and gradients, each a signature of mineral content, combustion residues, or microbial activity. The resulting chromatograms became visual indicators of environmental stress, waste accumulation, and potentially toxic compositions left behind by the energy industry. In this way, the method served not only as a form of ecological sensing but also as a poetic and speculative archive of air’s residues in the ground.

My fieldwork process includes several layers of documentation. I carry a portable CO₂ and PM2.5/PM10 sensor to collect real-time air quality data across selected sites: Narva’s Eesti and Balti power plants, ash mountains, abandoned housing in Kohtla-Järve, storage ponds and mining museums. These numbers offer not only environmental metrics but also anchors for speculative reflection—what does it mean to breathe this air detached from its former industrial rhythm?

Alongside these measurements, I keep an observational journal, collecting fragments of sensory experience, smell, sound, wind, and stories of the lived residents. The dilemma between numerical facts and sensory experience lies at the heart of how we inhabit weather. I open my phone. My weather app tells me it’s 28 degrees Celsius, but it “feels like” 15. This discrepancy exposes a quiet truth: weather is not only a measurement, but a bodily encounter. We want to be our own thermometers, registering the shifting climate through sensation, not statistics. The wind brushing past the ears, the sting of cold rain, the thickened air before a storm, these are not just data points, but intimate signs. That’s why the field notes exist: to register what the sensors miss, to hold onto the moments where numbers fail to fully translate the weather’s presence on skin.

Initial findings suggest that air pollution is not only chemical waste, but also a residue of political transition. The changed air mirror displaced workers, both suspended in a limbo of devaluation. I photograph and note how infrastructure and bodies intertwine. These dynamics manifest not only in bodies but also in the built environment.

I also collected sound recordings at different sites, wind against metal fencing, the talks of mining guides and the near-silence of fenced-off energy plants. But perhaps this layer was not as necessary from the perspective of air.

In the working process, I also trialled with fictional weather report makings, however the host-dominated approach didn’t feel the most suitable as the project aims to shift the agency away from the human.

Project description:

The project resulted in a multi-scalar documentation process has culminated in the ethnographic mapping of statistical air data, sensory field notes, and speculative photography that imagines how these architectures might exist within such atmospheres. The photographs originate from my on-site analogue film documentation and are further speculated through AI-assisted tools in Adobe Photoshop.

One core outcome is a digital field diary that combines sensor data (CO₂, PM2.5/PM10) with textual observations, photographs, and sketches. Each entry links air pollution levels with surrounding scenes, such as the ash-colored corridors of Sompa’s abandoned housing, or the quiet hum of air conditioning inside shopping malls built near former mining zones. These entries form a nonlinear narrative of both environmental saturation and social evaporation.

I produced a series of still images with AI. These works speculate on the visibility of air and the invisibility of political displacement. Together, these elements form an evolving archive: a fragmented cartography of waste, and afterlife. The work does not aim to resolve the contradictions between ecological transition, but to making visible the latent atmospheres of a region navigating both the end of an industry and the remains of its living infrastructure.

From this project onwards I reflect on how does one live in air as a socially constructed medium in the age of human conditioning? This question anchors my investigation into atmospheric inequality and sensory experience. Borrowing from Peter Sloterdijk’s proposition that air has become “elementally explicit” through thermodynamic and nuclear interventions. Clean air, increasingly treated as a resource rather than a right, becomes a marker of class and infrastructural privilege. The uneven distribution of breathable air across cities, especially in the Global South, is not incidental but tied to colonial extractivism, global trade flows, and the systemic disposability of certain populations. Air ethnographies thus trace not only the materiality of pollution but also the political architectures that govern who breathes what, where, and for how long.

Material / final images

attached in folder

Navigation

Possibly presented in an interactive layer mapping on the platform, either viewer can tick boxes and shows different layers? The layers could be named the same way as how I have named them in the photoshop file? I hope it opens? I have also attached images of how each may look as an export individually.  (similar to the work reference of https://louisiana.forensic-architecture.org/?)

If the texts could be floating/moving in the map that would be amazing, but it’s not essential.

References and credits:

Forensic Architecture. (n.d.). Louisiana: An open archive. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved July 15, 2025, from https://louisiana.forensic-architecture.org/

Kesküla, E. (2018). Waste people/value producers: Ambiguity, indeterminacy and post-socialist Russian‑speaking miners. In C. Alexander & A. Sanchez (Eds.), Indeterminacy: Waste, value and the imagination (pp. xx–xx). Pluto Press.

Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics (S. Corcoran, Trans.). Duke University Press. (Original work published 2003)

Pinsky, M. (2017). Pollution Pods [Installation]. http://www.michaelpinsky.com/portfolio/pollution-pods/

Sloterdijk, P. (2009). Terror from the air (A. Patton & S. Corcoran, Trans.). Semiotext(e). (Original work published 2002)

Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.

Ethnography of carbon displacement

Background:

Air in cities feels different depending on what raw materials they burn for energy—this was an observation noted by Michael Pinsky during his Pollution Pods project (Pinsky, n.d.). Estonia’s accession to the EU in 2004 meant stricter air pollution regulations, this pushes the Estonian’s energy industry to undergo further reconfiguration. Whilst the material waste of oil shale ash have been reestablished its value as entertainment landscapes, certain mining working bodies have been devalued to “waste” (Kesküla, 2018). Carbon traces both the numerical embodiment of such polluting policies and the common denominator for living bodies and  organics (Loeve and Vincent).

Main objectives:

How does the atmosphere record these changes in re/de-valuation of bodies and matter in this narrative of oil shale extraction? Can these quantified levels of CO2 and PM2.5/PM10 become an representation of the cyclic process of waste? I aim to conduct a systematic study of the elements of CO2 and PM2.5/PM10, in thinking about how elemental ethnography can be a method to trace their affective histories, and how they are entangled in systems of waste and extraction.

How long do these particles of waste remain the air, and how do embodied displacements experience this latent pollution, or how have they gained new rebirths? I am keeping in mind the discourse of discard studies and wasteland aesthetics, and how ‘wasting is a technique of power, broad and systematic approach to how some materials, practices, regions, and people are valued and devalued, become disposable or dominant’ (Liboiron and Lepawsky). Why are these mining workers treated as waste when their workforce is no longer desired, and they are chosen to be sacrificed? (Mbembe, 2011) These displaced bodies are not ecological migrants; rather, they are political displacement. I hypothesis that the air data of Narva oil shale infrastructures records its involvement in pollution and waste, and speculate on possible the regeneration and renewals at sites too. I am open minded to finding what becomes present at these sites of contest.

Technical description: tools, method, process

Possible fieldwork methods include observational journaling, photographic documentation, and collection of gas datas and sensorial observations (using a portable gas sensor). I would like to collaborate with other sound engineers to record other sound and smell elements for other presences that are beyond human frequencies.

Template of data : CO2, PM2.5/PM10 and more

Sites of interest/elemental tracing:

• narva, Eesti Power Plant
• Narva, Balti Power Plant
• indoor conditioned spheres/shopping centres/museums of mining /within proximities of ash mountains
• outdoor 'daily' living spaces?
• SOMPA abandoned housing blocks in the town of Kohtla-Järve/other ghost towns

References

• Kesküla, E. (2018). Waste people or value producers? Contesting bioeconomic imaginaries of oil shale mining in Estonia. Journal of Baltic Studies, 49(4), 487–505. https://doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2018.1503624
• Michael Pinsky. (n.d.). Pollution Pods. https://www.michaelpinsky.com/portfolio/pollution-pods-2/
• Printsmann, A., Sepp, M., & Luud, A. (2012). The land of oil-shale: the image, protection, and future of mining landscape heritage. In Häyrynen, S., Turunen, R., & Nyman, J. (Eds.), Locality, Memory, Reconstruction: The Cultural Challenges and Possibilities of Former Single-Industry Communities (pp. 180–196). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
• Tsing, A. L., Swanson, H. A., Gan, E., & Bubandt, N. (Eds.). (2017). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1qft070
• The Baltic Atlas. (2016). Baltic States Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale
• Achille Mbembe (2011) Necropolitics
• Sacha LOEVE & Bernadette BENSAUDE VINCENT, THE MULTIPLE SIGNATURES OF CARBON
• Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky , Discard Studies, Wasting, Systems, and Pow