TP 1: Hollowed Landscapes. Imaginations of Life in Infrastructures of Extraction

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

The project explores how social, affective (Lauren Berlant) and elementary (John Durham Peters) infrastructures undergo fundamental change in processes of deindustrialization. Its focus is on the contemporary Ruhr region, where it is also located. To situate the research on this region in current international discourses, however, its development will be compared with processes in two other regions: in the state of Minas Gerais ("General Mines") in Brazil, where unabated mining continues, and in post-industrial areas in Slovakia, where society has been restructured in a much more disruptive way since the early 1990s. The comparison is particularly concerned with the simultaneity and contemporaneity of the processes being researched. Analyzing performative works, installations and the institutions that commission them, the project examines the - violent and utopian - social imaginary (Cornelius Castoriadis) of societies of excessive raw material extraction, the often-traumatic changes this imaginary undergoes when the resources are depleted, and the remnants of mining in societies and landscapes. The framework project (PI) explores the role of theater and art institutions in the processes of transformation from an industrial to a post-industrial society in the Ruhr area from 1989 on (e.g. International Building Exhibition IBA Emscher Park, Theatre and Music Festival Ruhrtriennale) and under the sign of persistent extractivism in Minas Gerais (e.g. open-air museum Inhotim in Brumadinho). The first sub-project explores artistic projects that deal with irreversible changes of "nature" or "landscape" through the extraction of raw materials and their relationship to the "environment", with a focus on post-industrial wastelands. The second sub-project deals with the changes in affective infrastructure in post-industrial life-worlds in a comparison between the Ruhr area and Košice and Martin in Slovakia focusing on self-organized cultural centers. In their interplay, the three projects research the sensory perception of the change in life-worlds which in turn had been created by large-scale extraction of raw materials.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5710: Infrastructure: Aesthetics and Supply
• International Connection: Austria, Brazil, USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Dr. Sabeth Buchmann; Professorin Dr. Rosalind C. Morris; Professor Dr. José Miguel Wisnik