Platzhalter: 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.
The class will take place weekly at FHP, including some joint online sessions with the international partners, as well as a one week residency in Estonia. During this 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.
METHODOLOGY & TASKS
Toxicity is a specific genre of harm that describes the (re)ordering of living systems across timeframes and scales. Following Tironi and Liberoin, (p. 336;) it creates shared conditions for what thrives and what is altered, what 'persist[s] and redistributes[s] ' and 'what is destroyed, injured, and constrained' both as a premise for other things to thrive (Murphy, 2017: 141–142).
During the one-week residency in Estonia, we trace this reordering of life across the entire life cycle of oil shales - from their site of extraction along the Estonian coastline, to fossil fuel processing plants, all the way to the open waste dumps and riverbeds, where the toxic sludge and the industrial ash are deposited and dumped.
Together with local residents and field guides, we will visit ash mountains, ghost villages and abandoned manufacturing plants, built under Soviet Occupation (1941 – 1991), when oil shale production was at its historical height. Additional insights will be provided by scientific inputs from researchers in biology, geology, and environmental history in preparatory sessions online.
Our main task will be to create a living index of liminal relations that sustain the shale oil ecosystem, mapping how they animate, de/recompose and transform social and natural landscapes, organisms and bodies at different speeds, durations and levels of intensity. Drawing on acoustic sensing, environmental mappings, and elemental ethnography / bio-geochemical analysis, we hope to reveal the less noticeable tensions, collaborations, and attunements that emerge from 'non-consensual inhabitations' (Masco) and forced transfers and unpack how they facilitate and/or disrupt land-body relations against a backdrop of shifting geopolitical borders and energy regimes.
OUTCOMES
The outcome of our material probes and observations will be documented in a shared workbook (digital/online publication) based on group projects conducted in the field.
Participants in this workshop will develop an understanding of bio-chemical processes and relations as critical infrastructures of geopolitical transformations and recognize how socio-ecological change is as much about (re)configuring life and responsibility beyond the individual body (Murphy, 2017, p. 479) as it is premised upon structures of violence and extraction that require land and bodies as sacrifice zones.
