DEADLY AFFAIRS

A group exhibition at Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp (2019), examining how environmental harm is constitutive of European capitalism and its borders. Through artistic and research-based positions, the exhibition traced how toxic trades, extraction, and waste are integral to the production of labour, land, and citizenship within Europe, while displacing contamination beyond its jurisdiction. Focusing on slow and often imperceptible forms of violence, Deadly Affairs foregrounded how bodies, ecologies, and economies are entangled through unequal exposure shaped by class and race.

DER SCHWEIß DER ERDE / THE SWEAT OF THE EARTH

An artistic research project centred on the pseudo-scientific practice of earth cooking, developed by Stephan Thierbach. Through multiple iterations, the project convenes publics around soils from landscapes shaped by extraction, using heated earth and distilled scents to explore affective relations between bodies and land. Performed with soils from the sewage fields of the Rieselfelder, the moorlands outside Bremen, and the industrial landscapes of Bitterfeld-Wolfen, it investigates how bodies and landscapes remain materially and affectively entangled through extractive pasts and their ongoing aftermath.

SUBTERRANEAN REVERBERATIONS

An ongoing artistic research project investigating how listening can bring us into proximity with the enduring aftermath of extraction. Through field recordings, oral histories, and listening practices, it makes the infrastructures of remediation audible. Built to contain groundwater pollution, the pumps nevertheless emit a faint yet persistent hum. Listening becomes an epistemic mode of inquiry, revealing the extractive relations that persist beyond the appearance of environmental repair.

THE BLACK TRIANGLE

An artistic research project exploring how environmental conflicts at Europe's peripheries are mediated and experienced. Centred on the transnational conflict surrounding the Turów open-pit coal mine in the historically polluted Black Triangle spanning Poland, Czechia, and Germany, the project works through metabolic practices of fermenting, pickling, and brewing tea from locally harvested plants to investigate how mediated landscapes become embodied.

REDISTRIBUTE TOXICITY

An art-science research project and installation exploring toxic inheritance through the politics of redistribution. Centred on seeds gathered from plants growing around the Vorketzin hazardous waste landfill—where hazardous waste was once displaced from West to East Germany—the project redistributes those seeds along new trajectories. In doing so, it reworks the direction of movement itself, treating redistribution as a material, political, and ethical practice that confronts the uneven afterlives of extraction.

DRACHENBAU / DRAGON BURROW

A long-term artistic inquiry linking the petrochemical landscapes of Bitterfeld-Wolfen in Germany and Fushun in northeastern China. Centred on the figure of the dragon, the project brings Eastern and Western mythologies into conversation through sound, resonance, and storytelling. It traces how extractive imaginaries continue to resonate across local histories and hollowed-out landscapes, revealing unexpected connections between geographically distant sites.

THE LONG TERM YOU CAN NOT AFFORD - on the distribution of the toxic

A group exhibition and public programme at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2019), exploring the colonial legacies and global distribution of toxicity. Bringing together artistic, scientific, and activist perspectives, the project traced how extractive economies produce sacrifice zones, displacing toxic burdens across time and space while protecting some lives and environments at the expense of others. Through artistic installations, public discussions, and collective learning, the exhibition framed toxicity as a shared yet uneven condition shaped by colonial histories and ongoing structural inequalities.

ARTE 42 - Wie viel Gift verträgt die Welt?

A 30-minute documentary film released in 2023, examining the double-edged role of industrial chemicals—seducing us into comfort while releasing toxins that push ecosystems to their limits. Produced for Arte’s series 42: The Answer to Almost Everything by Nonfiction Society, the film reflects on Earth’s capacities and asks how we might understand ourselves anew in an unevenly chemically saturated world.

THE SKY INSIDE THE SOILS

A multiphase, co-authored artistic research project investigating how extractive landscapes continue to transform over time. Treating plants as mediators between soils and sky, it uses pigments extracted from vegetation growing around a former coal mine turned chemical waste deposit to develop silkscreen printing as an iterative method of inquiry. By reprinting historical archival images with locally sourced pigments, the project traces how petrochemical landscapes are materially and aesthetically reconfigured, foregrounding the shifting afterlives of fossil extraction.

TROUBLED WATERS

A collaborative graphic novel bringing together researchers and graphic artists to explore how water pollution and mismanagement are experienced across different landscapes. Set across three post-industrial sites in Denmark, Germany, and Polesia on the Belarus–Ukraine border, the series uses horror as a narrative device to engage the affective dimensions of environmental harm that often remain difficult to grasp through technical or documentary accounts.