Exposition

The Black Triangle—Commoning Borderland Coal Ecologies (2024)

Caroline Ektander, Carlina Rossee, Jasmina Al-Qaisi, Alexandra Toland
open exposition

About this exposition

Turów is an active open-pit brown coal mine located in the ‘Black Triangle’—a once sensationally polluted industrial region in Central Europe roughly contiguous with the brown-coal belt of Southern Poland, former East Germany and the Czech Republic. The mine, which fell into Polish jurisdiction after the fall of the Soviet Union, epitomises a transnational environmental conflict. Despite the encroaching effects of the Turów mine on its neighbouring European states and its inhabitants, the Polish government refuses to stop coal extraction. The dispute has generated a lot of media and activist attention in past years, but also raises eminent questions about how to make sense of the complexities and contradictions entangled with various regimes of energy. As the human faculties are poorly trained to register and to think meaningfully about the timescales of extraction and its distributed effects, this contribution comes as an invitation to experience energy entanglements otherwise. Challenging the flatness of the common dispute as portrayed in the media, we focus attention on the undercurrents flowing beneath the logics of public discourses about ‘clean’ and ‘green’ transitions and open pathways to sense metabolic flows of energy that permeate and shapeshift in environmental media—over time and space—and ultimately become us. To help us on the way, we ferment vegetables and drink nettle tea sourced from the mining region as a collective, metabolic practice. We add salt to slow down the passing of time. We conserve, observe and finally ingest to highlight the porosity and intimacy of geo-social relations and viscerally process their toxic commonalities.
typeresearch exposition
keywordsExtraction, energy metabolism, toxicity, embodiment, plant-coal temporalities
date10/09/2024
published18/12/2024
last modified18/12/2024
statuspublished
affiliationBauhaus-Universität Weimar
copyrightCC
licenseCC BY-NC-ND
languageEnglish
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2806768/2806769
doihttps://doi.org/10.22501/hub.2806768
published inHUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
portal issue3. HUB Issue #3 / Autumn 2024 / Metabolic Media


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nameWhatsApp Image 2024-08-30 at 11.01.03 (1)
copyrightcaroline ektander
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nameScreenshot 2024-11-14 at 10.20.56
copyrightcarline rossee
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nameWhatsApp Image 2024-08-30 at 11.01.03 (2)
copyrightcarline rossee
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copyrightjasmina al-qaisi
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namephoto_2024-10-28 18.23.35
copyrightJasmina Al-Qaisi
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