| Beschreibung |
Prof. Ursula Damm, Prof. Kerstin Ergenzinger, Mindaugas Gapsevicius (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)
* Registration for the course took place in February 2025, and the participants have been selected.
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. |
