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counter_mappings
as the sacrifice begins to shimmer
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knowbotiq’s counter-mappings (un-mapping) explore heavily contaminated environments: a coal slag heap that has been burning for decades, a lake contaminated with radioactive material and covered in concrete, or a gigantic mound of phosphogypsum. These “waste landscapes”, so-called sacrifice zones, are the products of humanity’s insatiable greed for raw materials – substances that have been extracted from existing ecological systems through enormous technological expertise and energy expenditure. What remains are environments of immense destruction, for which no concepts of renaturation, rewilding or restoration have been developed. They defy the categories of familiar living environments: too hot, too radioactive, too corrosive – too toxic. These are zones that have spiralled out of control and are often only prevented from escalating through further enormous technical effort – vast exclusion zones that may only be entered by humans with explicit permission and protective measures. They appear as “Ruins of Capitalism” (Anna Tsing), necessary to sustain planetary capitalism elsewhere. Their spatial extent, the complexity of their techno-ecological processes and, above all, their temporal dimensions defy human scales.
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knowbotiq works with current satellite images of such post-extractivist landscapes and attempts to make them legible in a different way: the concrete-covered, radioactively contaminated Lake Karachay in Russia, the phosphate mine (Gafsa–Gabès) in the Tunisian desert, or the coal seam in Centralia, USA, which has been burning since 1962. These are places that have destroyed or driven away the organisms that once lived here and now (must) give rise to other forms of community. Here, often only extremophile organisms – thermophiles, psychrophiles, halophiles, acidophiles, alkaliphiles, radiophiles and other species – can survive; these have adapted to extreme heat, acidity, toxicity or radioactivity and form new symbiotic relationships. These places will always have a future, because their post-apocalyptic adaptation processes extend far beyond human timeframes.
Against this backdrop, knowbotiq inserts extremophiles – mostly molecular protagonists such as bacteria, fungi, plants and microorganisms – into satellite images, into those empirical exclusion zones that have hitherto been made visible and communicable primarily through the technologically and patriarchally coded ‘God’s View’ (Steyerl). On these photographic documents, knowbotiq creates a feral aesthetic through ornamental collages, transforming them into cartographies of hope and care: the territories begin to glitter and shimmer. In doing so, knowbotiq draws on a term coined by Deborah Bird Rose: Shimmer.
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Rose describes ‘shimmer’ as an aesthetic that allows people to recognise that they are part of a fabric of relationships between humans, animals, plants, technologies, landscapes and other life forms. ‘Shimmer’ makes ecologies tangible, not as passive objects but as active, interconnected beings, processes and infrastructures. Technical systems and technological processes are not obscured in this context, but are understood as part of these relationships.
The notion of a total ecological collapse with no future is abandoned in favour of an ethic and aesthetic of attention (Rose) and noticing (Tsing). Instead, the focus turns to the fragile, barely perceptible and often unmeasurable relationships through which life persists. Shimmer denotes the moment in which these relationships become visible or perceptible: as interdependence in a more-than-human world.
The revised cartographies of waste landscapes seek out such moments. When the controlled bird’s-eye view simultaneously reveals molecular micro-ecologies, the seemingly sovereign gaze begins to dissolve. It begins to shimmer. From a distance, a new form of perception emerges – and with it a glimmer of responsibility, understood as ‘respons-ability’: the ability to respond and to perceive relationships.
