Filtering Oranienburg

Every action, whether human or non-human, is based on knowledge — but also incorporates non-knowledge. For whoever waits for complete knowledge before acting will either wait forever or get caught in loops of considerations. This inevitable interplay of knowledge and non-knowledge may also be understood as a filtering process. Filters, be they practices or apparatuses, enable entities to act in uncertain situations. As a fundamental cultural technique, they help to structure knowledge for agency and thus mediate between knowledge and action. Precisely for this reason, however, filtering as a cultural technique is inherently problematic, as it has the tendency of working as a non-transparent technique of power. Filters can negotiate between the desirable and the undesirable and between what is considered dangerous or safe. As a cultural technique, filtering may be context-independent — but it is never context-neutral (cf. Cubasch, Alwin J. et al. (2021) and Kassung (2023)).

This environmental dimension of filtering becomes particularly significant and consequential in what is filtered and condensed as »waste«, and which then inevitably has to be disposed of. From the perspective of cultural studies, these toxic legacies are »traces« that help us study filters, for they can be considered materializations of historical power imbalances in the shape of concrete and problematic landscapes — which, however, often remain below the threshold of perception.

This theoretical framework forms the basis for the research project »Filtering Oranienburg«. This project explores the history of the town of Oranienburg near Berlin as a radioactive industrial landscape. At the turn of the 20th century, large chemical factories that supplied Berlin‘s gas light industry begun to cluster in and around Oranienburg. Here, tons of monazite sands were accumulated and refined to extract radioactive thorium and the rare earth cerium, among other elements. These intermediates were not only used for the mass production of incandescent lamps. The companies also worked to develop new uses for their materials. We refer to this process as commodification of rare earths and radioactivity.

The residual radioactivity present in Oranienburg can be traced back to these industrial activities, and to the destruction of several production sites during a bombing raid in March 1945, near the end of World War II. The goal of the raid was to destroy this hub of National-Socialist nuclear science, technology and materials to prevent it from falling into Soviet hands.

However, while Oranienburg was slowly becoming a toxic environment in the early 20th century, one of the local companies, Auer AG, begun to develop filtering technologies through which it profited economically from the local and overall increase in toxic environments. While dealing with rare earths and other substances, Auer AG was one of the first companies to specialize in the production of protective equipment for toxic environments. It produced gas masks that were widely used during World War I, and it supplied Nazi Germany with air raid protection equipment during World War II. We refer to this as commodification of toxic environments.

Importantly, Oranienburg and its denizens were never passive spectators of the technologies used and the environments around them. Archival materials from the 1920s to the present prove their efforts to question, change, and improve the state of their environment. Oranienburg’s toxic landscape was always a contested space.

»Filtering Oranienburg« therefore pursues approaches of Environmental History that, in a first research dimension, critically address the power structures that shaped the extraction, refining, and disposal of industrial materials in Oranienburg. Yet, these structures can only be thoroughly understood through the combination of a global perspective on material flows with a microscopic and topological approach that takes seriously the polychronic nature of environment and technology. In the concept of “toxic landscapes”, a wide variety of time scales and rhythms intertwine. Therefore, the project will attempt to develop new concepts of landscape and temporality. Only such a methodology can analytically open up the complexity of the different time scales and geographical dimensions that define Oranienburg’s history. The result will be a multi-perspectival narrative that deals with the specific interplay of places, power, environment, and filtering technologies, while at the same time aiming for conceptualizations that are both contemporary, and transferable to other places.

The second research dimension of the project understands Oranienburg as an experimental field to explore and develop approaches to collective futures in damaged landscapes. This involves first mapping and engaging with the socio-political landscape of contemporary Oranienburg. This will enable the research project to practice a mode of reflection that continuously looks behind conceptual understandings of participation, expert intervention, and the relationship between science and local interests.

The project aims to create an AR museum for Oranienburg which makes the legacies of its history tangible through visual, auditory and haptic interaction. Walking through Oranienburg using this application, visitors can experience the layers of time, see the factories and camps, the radioactive contamination of the soil, and the hidden danger of unexploded bombs. Understanding Oranienburg as a case study, the project aims to explore whether this AR intervention embedded in the landscape could be a prototypical navigation system and tool to traverse the ever-growing number of toxic landscapes that humans have created around the globe. The goal is to determine if this intervention format is capable of decentralizing the museal gaze, and of creating multisensory encounters that transcend the mere showcasing of toxic legacies by creating a dialogic situation of exhibition, research, and Citizen Science.

In this project, Oranienburg becomes a paradigmatic research object, through which we reflect and elaborate our understanding of filters as an essential cultural technique. We believe that Filtering will play a central role for the societies of the 21st century - for better or for worse. Filtering, here, entails both material and discursive levels, and must always be understood as building on historical filtering processes. Therefore, the project aims to understand Oranienburg’s history and present as a genealogical cascade of past filtering operations, and strives to make them tangible.

More info on the blog.