TP 3: Aesthetic Practices of Attunement as Access to Colonial Infrastructures of Extraction

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Henriette Gunkel
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 524611401

This TP, anchored in media studies, aims to investigate what remains of colonial extractive infrastructures. It asks what the remains reveal about the history of colonial violence and how the 'legacy' of that violence persists today and continues to shape the infrastructures of transnational extraction economies of the future, be that, mining the ocean for diamonds and rare earth elements or facilitating Europe’s "green transition". While some elements of the locations where extraction once took place are easily recognizable on site or in archival documents and maps - rails, telegraph wires, water pipes - other elements elude perception. The TP is concerned with such spectral elements that exist at the threshold of perception in the context of Namibia where the history of German-British colonial extractive infrastructure has left traces in different parts of the landscape, e.g. in the Namib desert, the Atlantic Ocean, the salt pans along the coastline of the Northern Fields. Against this background, the aim of this TP is to examine how aesthetic practices of attunement, as used by artists and artist-researchers, function to open up new and different forms of perception and understanding of the hidden and repressed histories of extractive violence in Namibia by engaging with both inherited spectral infrastructures: the remains of the colonial and genocidal infrastructures of diamond mining in the Namib desert, and how these intersect with the current and prospective infrastructures that enable newly initiated green hydrogen projects in the south of Namibia. The concept of attunement is understood as an embodied media practice that combines technology-related media science with an awareness of the - human and non-human - body as a medium. The research aims to show how such attunement practices can uncover traces of colonial extractive infrastructure in the context of Namibia; and how these practices reveal how the history of German colonialism and genocide is reflected in the extractive zone; and how practices of attunement make tangible the survival of this history of colonial violence in today's extraction infrastructures.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5710: Infrastructure: Aesthetics and Supply