Marie Buschmann
from docx import Document
Load the existing document to append new proposals
doc = Document("/mnt/data/Idea_Paper_Proposals_Fixed_Format.docx")
BIP 2
doc.add_page_break() doc.add_heading("BIP 2: Landscape, Memory, and Postcards from Other Places", level=2) doc.add_heading("Background", level=3) doc.add_paragraph(
"Estonia’s oil shale zone is a landscape cut through by centuries of imperialism, extractivism, and displacement. "
"From the Russian Empire to the Soviet Union, northeastern Estonia (Ida-Virumaa) became a monofunctional industrial region. "
"Towns were built around mines, populated by imported labor, and stripped of ecological and cultural continuity. Today, "
"semi-coke hills, smoking spoil tips, and chemically altered wetlands are markers of slow violence. These are not empty ruins; "
"they are active archives where environmental damage and historical amnesia collide. Concepts like Shifting Baseline Syndrome (SBS) "
"reveal how generations forget previous ecological states, accepting degradation as normal. Memory fades, but the landscape still remembers."
) doc.add_heading("Focus, Question, Anticipated Outcomes", level=3) doc.add_paragraph(
"This project focuses on ecological and cultural scars left by oil shale extraction. Rather than conduct interviews (which may be impractical), "
"we propose to observe and translate these wounds into a visual language. Our main question is: How do landscapes remember what we forget? "
"And how can these memories be interpreted without anthropocentric assumptions? Each “scar”—whether a dried-out swamp, a collapsed shaft, "
"or a rebranded hill—will be treated as a trace of violence, but also of persistence. The outcome will be a set of speculative “postcards” or "
"souvenirs that visualize these traces: frottages from scarred surfaces, photographs of damaged landforms, embedded barcodes that play "
"soundscapes or fragments of poetic text. By materializing these memories as mementos, we hope to challenge the transformation of trauma into "
"tourist attraction, and explore how we might engage with landscapes as wounded subjects."
) doc.add_heading("Technical Description (Methods & Tools)", level=3) doc.add_paragraph(
"We will use frottage (rubbing), drawing, and photography to capture textures and traces from specific damaged sites. "
"Sound recordings will complement these, creating immersive “memory soundscapes.” We will embed QR codes on the postcards. "
"Poems or short texts, generated from field impressions may also be an option. We will also use archival and speculative writing to connect "
"specific sites to past cultural and ecological contexts. Each item will function as a poetic translation of a site’s scarred memory."
) doc.add_heading("References", level=3) for ref in [
"Kaljundi & Sooväli-Sepping, eds. Maastik ja mälu [Landscape and Memory]",
"Printsmann, Anneli. “The Land of Oil Shale.” (2012)",
"Mildeberg, Saara. “A Post-Industrial Adventure Land?” (2024)",
"Sooväli-Sepping & Palang. “Imaginary Landscapes” (2005)",
"https://www.reachtheworld.org/annas-journey-estonia/world-connections/bogs-and-mires-estonia?page=2"
]:
doc.add_paragraph(ref, style='List Bullet')
BIP 3
doc.add_page_break() doc.add_heading("BIP 3: Let the Swamp Speak: Memory, Death, and Carbon in the Hollow Earth", level=2) doc.add_heading("Background", level=3) doc.add_paragraph(
"Swamps are more than wet wastelands. They are ecological time machines—dense with memory, carbon, and myth. "
"Estonia’s northeastern oil shale region has radically altered its swamp systems: dewatering operations during underground "
"mining near Narva and Kohtla-Järve drained wetlands, permanently lowering groundwater levels and leaving some swamp beds "
"unstable or hollow. These altered swamps no longer store carbon—they release it. Yet even in their damaged state, they preserve "
"the memory of past bodies, myths, and thresholds between life and decay. Folklore figures like Eksitaja, the misleader of bogs, "
"linger in local imagination, reanimating the terrain as dangerous, sacred, or enchanted. From the perspective of environmental "
"humanities, these post-extraction wetlands are more than ecosystems—they are sites of layered cultural and ecological significance."
) doc.add_heading("Focus, Question, Anticipated Outcomes", level=3) doc.add_paragraph(
"This proposal focuses on degraded and altered swamps in Ida-Virumaa as living archives of the oil shale era. We ask: "
"How do drained or damaged bogs remember histories of extraction, and how can we access or translate that memory? These swamp "
"systems—disrupted by underground voids, piping, ash run-off, and drainage infrastructure—have become feral landscapes of contaminated "
"diversity. They host strange symbioses of industrial ruin, residual toxicity, and new biological colonizers. We want to document the "
"tension between decomposition and resilience in these sites, tracing what persists, what returns, and what mutates. We also want to "
"reinterpret the cultural perception of swamps—from threatening wasteland to sacred, mnemonic terrain. Our anticipated outcome is an "
"audiovisual “listening practice” that attends to the swamp not only as an ecological threshold but as a storyteller. Through speculative "
"design and environmental sensing, we hope to reveal swamps as more-than-human agents in a post-natural world, where nature, industry, and memory converge."
) doc.add_heading("Technical Description (Methods & Tools)", level=3) doc.add_paragraph(
"Methods: Field photography and sketching to document swamp boundaries, collapsed zones, and residues of mining infrastructure. "
"Observing signs of industrial sedimentation and biological succession—pipes overtaken by moss, ash hills seeping into wetlands, or "
"invasive reeds overtaking native flora. Sampling water, soil, and plants for basic visual/textural analysis (using color, pH strips, "
"layering jars). Recording ambient sounds—bubbling, insects, wind through reeds—as speculative swamp soundscapes. Mapping “zones of memory” "
"where stories, material residues, and changing ecologies intersect. Collecting or reimagining local folklore through drawing, micro-poetry, or storytelling."
) doc.add_heading("References", level=3) for ref in [
"Anna Tsing et al., “Contaminated Diversity” and Feral Atlas (2020)",
"Linda Kaljundi & Helen Sooväli-Sepping, eds., Maastik ja mälu [Landscape and Memory] (2014)",
"Saara Mildeberg, \"A Post-Industrial Adventure Land?\" (2024)",
"Anneli Printsmann, \"The Land of Oil Shale\" (2012)",
"Estonian folklore archives (Eksitaja and swamp-based pseudomyths)"
]:
doc.add_paragraph(ref, style='List Bullet')
Save updated document
final_doc_all_path = "/mnt/data/Idea_Paper_Proposals_Complete_All_BIPs.docx" doc.save(final_doc_all_path)
final_doc_all_path