Foregone Landscapes

How do landscapes shaped by extraction, experimentation, and material transformation become sites of knowledge production? This workshop brings together research on extractive environments, material histories, and visual regimes to examine how landscapes are not only transformed by industrial and military practices but also reconfigured as epistemic and experimental spaces. From the global circulation of materials such as monazite to the visual politics of mining and the ecological afterlives of former military terrains, the contributions explore how environmental knowledge emerges from historically conditioned and often contaminated sites. How can these approaches be brought into productive dialogue to understand better the entanglement of material processes, visual practices, and environmental knowledge? The workshop aims to initiate a focused exchange among the participating projects, identify shared conceptual and methodological ground, and explore possibilities for future collaboration and joint scientific publications.

Schedule

11:00 am
Arrival & Welcoming Remarks

11:00 – 11:30 am
Michaela Büsse (TU Dresden) - Landscape as Laboratory: Environmental Experiments in the Aftermath of Modernity

11:30 am – 12:00 pm
Ana Clara Alves de Oliveira (Universität Freiburg) - Exhausted Lands: Discussing the Visual History of Mining Extractivism in Minas Gerais, Brazil

12:30 – 1:00 pm

Alwin J. Cubasch (ExC MOA) – Epistemic Shores: Monazite and the Production of Knowledge in Transit between Brazil and Germany

1:00 – 1:30 pm
Zsuzsanna Dominika Ihar (MPIWG) – TBA

1:30 – 3:00 pm
Final Discussion and Outlook