GMU:Re-enchanting the field/Laura Günther

Idea Paper Proposals

Marie Buschmann, Laura Günther

We decided to draft more than one idea to have a bigger table for discussions since so many ideas had to find a seat =)

BIP 1: Let My Relative Speak: Listening to Water in the Oil Shale Zone

Background

“Water is life” (Mni Wiconi) is a declaration rooted in Indigenous ecofeminist movements, especially among North American water protectors. It frames water not just as a resource but as a living relative, deserving of respect and rights. In Estonia, water has been instrumentalized by the oil shale industry for over a century—used to dewater mines, cool processing plants, and transport toxic residues. In Ida-Virumaa, these hydrological interventions have reshaped entire ecosystems, drained wetlands, and created contaminated zones. Yet water also resists. At sites like Ratva’s “Two Witches’ Wells,” seasonal eruptions of groundwater—resulting from boreholes drilled to relieve mine pressure—have been absorbed into pseudomythologies. These eruptions transform infrastructure into spectacle, revealing water’s agency and cultural resonance.

Focus, Question, Anticipated Outcomes

Our focus is on contaminated water bodies as nonhuman agents in post-extractivist landscapes. Specifically, we aim to investigate how water mediates toxicity, memory, and myth in areas surrounding Narva and Kohtla-Järve. Our central research question is: How can we perceive and represent water not as a passive backdrop but as a subject—an expressive, relational force with its own rhythms, grievances, and stories? We hope to explore this through multiple lenses: water as a carrier of contamination, a site of intergenerational grief, and a shape-shifting presence in folklore. In doing so, we wish to contribute to a speculative methodology that includes water as a political subject. Our anticipated outcome is a multi-sensory exploration of water through sound, image, and narrative. We aim to reframe post-industrial water bodies not just as zones of harm, but as archives and storytellers that demand attention and ethical response.

Technical Description (Methods & Tools)

We will use field recording (including hydrophones, if possible) to capture the sounds of water in contaminated or re-engineered sites like boreholes and runoff basins. Photography and video will help document water’s surfaces, flows, and seasonal expressions. We plan to collect water samples and create a “living archive” by preserving organic and inorganic matter in vials (with water, alcohol, or oil). As a speculative gesture, we may inscribe local myths or invented rituals on transparent materials and submerge them, allowing water movement to rewrite the text. Our approach combines documentation, storytelling, and experimental cartography.

References

·      Murphy, Michelle. “Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations.” (2017)

·      Printsmann, Anneli. “The Land of Oil Shale.” (2012)

·      Tsing, Anna et al. Feral Atlas. (2020)

·      Mildeberg, Saara. “A Post-Industrial Adventure Land?” (2024)

·      Jana Winderen: Field-based sound works (https://www.janawinderen.com)

·      FHP project reference: https://fhp.incom.org/project/28636

BIP 2: Landscape, Tourism, Memory, and Postcards (or Souvenirs) from Other Places

Background

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. As part of our research, we began by exploring this region digitally through Google Maps. In some locations, purple icons appear—tiny cameras with flashes—signaling so-called “points of interest” or “scenic spots.” Clicking on them reveals images uploaded by visitors: people posing in front of spoil heaps or wetlands, taking pictures of themselves or their dogs in front of the wounded landscape. You can find a selection of these images for download here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1FNODajTB6GWR7_a26Bju7IiKxSEGJSLZ?usp=share_link

Focus, Question, Anticipated Outcomes

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? How do these anthropogenic landscapes shape local identity? How do people stage themselves in front of industrial wounds? How can we engage with landscapes as wounded subjects, not passive scenery? And what does it mean to remember through stone, soil, and silence?

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.

Technical Description (Methods & Tools)

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.” will be embedded as 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.

References

• Printsmann, Anneli. “The Land of Oil Shale.” (2012)
• Mildeberg, Saara. “A Post-Industrial Adventure Land?” (2024)
• Sooväli-Sepping & Palang. “Imaginary Landscapes” (2005)
• Kaljundi & Sooväli-Sepping, eds. Maastik ja mälu [Landscape and Memory]
• https://www.reachtheworld.org/annas-journey-estonia/world-connections/bogs-and-mires-estonia?page=2
• https://chertluedde.com/exhibition/mail-art-exchangeberlin-los-angeles/
• https://leamariawittich.de/the-sorrows-of-nature
• https://leamariawittich.de/suite-der-steinernen-souvenirs
• https://www.esbaluard.org/en/exposicion/lluisvecinarufiandis/

BIP 3 Let the Swamp Speak: Memory, Death, and Carbon in the Hollow Earth

Background

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.

Focus, Question, Anticipated Outcomes

This proposal focuses on degraded and altered swamps in Ida-Virumaa as living archives of the oil shale era. I 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. My 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.

Technical Description (Methods & Tools)

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.

References

• 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)

BIP 4:  A Poetic Homage to the Stone

Background

In the Anthropocene—a geological epoch defined by the lasting impact of human activity—stones become not just passive remnants, but active witnesses. Extractive industries, such as oil shale mining in northeastern Estonia, have left behind scarred terrains: chemically altered wetlands, semi-coke hills, and unstable spoil tips. These landscapes are inscribed with the histories of imperialism, industrialization, and ecological trauma. Yet within these ruined geologies lies the potential for new forms of storytelling and care. Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin, this project turns to stones—not as resources to be extracted, but as fellow beings with whom we might enter into poetic relation.

Main Object / Focus of Fieldwork

The focus of this project is to create a homage to the stone—a book-object composed of lithographic prints that visualize and interpret a selected poem about stones, maybe one by Ursula K. Le Guin, maybe own. The fieldwork centers on the Estonian oil shale region, where layers of geological violence persist as visible, tangible scars. Our core research question is: How can stones serve as mediators of memory and imagination in damaged post-industrial ecologies? And how might poetic language offer a form of listening to the nonhuman, particularly to the stone as both witness and kin?

Ursula K. Le Guin states in her Essay „Deep in Admiration“ that „by demonstrating and performing aesthetic order or beauty, poetry can move minds to the sense of fellowship that prevents careless usage and exploitation of our fellow beings, waste and cruelty.“

By combining poetry with material from the oil shale region—stone dust or ash, incorporated into handmade paper—we explore how trauma, matter, and metaphor intersect. Ideally, a piece of limestone or oil shale from Estonia would serve as the lithographic matrix.

The anticipated outcome is an artist’s book that acts as a meditation on time, human error, and the consistant presence of the geologic in our cultural present. It resists objectification and instead embraces what Mary Jacobus calls “the stilled voice of the inanimate object”.

Technical Description

Lithography will be used as the central printing technique, ideally on limestone or oil shale, if transport and handling are possible and safe. The paper will be handmade, incorporating ashes or stone particles sourced (ethically and safely) from the oil shale region, depending on toxicity assessments. A poem by Ursula K. Le Guin, or a newly written poem in dialogue with her work, will serve as the textual backbone of the book. Visual compositions will respond to both the text and the tactile qualities of the materials, allowing the stone’s own visual language to guide the process. The final format will be a book object, potentially accompanied by digital documentation of the material research and site visits.

References

• Ursula K. Le Guin – Deep in Admiration
• Mary Jacobus – Romantic Things (2012)
• Jeffrey Jerome Cohen – Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2015)
• https://leamariawittich.de/the-sorrows-of-nature