Spaces
Infrastructures
Concepts
Strategies
Baldeep Kaur is a doctoral candidate in the DFG-funded RTG ‘minor cosmopolitanisms’ at the University of Potsdam. They study how colonialism is repaired and maintained during phases of large-scale global transitions. Alongside their thesis, a longer-term project is to imagine velocities of academic work that nourish slow work and protect slow workers. Identifying speed as not only a property of work but a dimension that determines the work/er, they try to realize methods that anticipate failure and exhaustion.
I. Shutter Speed
“If you have a pacemaker, keep a 5m distance.“
In a new place, a new research tool could be the most reliable point of orientation. This was my first attempt at fieldwork using a digital camera. It helped me make sense of things, but it also affected my decisions about what to look at, and how. As the group moved from lignite mine to solar farm, the question getting louder inside my head was this: how easily does a place give itself to research? What tool does it respond to more than others?
After the grain of the lignite mine, the clean repeating slopes of the solar farm are a visual shock. This airport/ almost mine/solar system seen from above will be a sea of blue. Zoom out far enough and it could even be a lake with suspiciously clean-cut banks. I walk around, a little afraid, and pick a scene.
II. Samples
At one point in the lignite mine tour, our guide began filling plastic bags with clods of dark earth and giving them away. Take as much as you want, he said, excited and animated in his generosity. I held back and watched, trying to decide what I wanted to do and whether what I would do here should be different from what I would do if I were in Panjab, or on Native Lands. A siren droned somewhere behind me. Later, after the tour ended, I took out a tissue and gave my face and neck a good wipe with it. A yellow-brown residue came away immediately – a sample with my skin cells mixed in, which would yield no empirical data meaningful to any journal, but it gave me the opportunity to reflect on where I was and what was my place within this place.
I checked my phone again for a desperately awaited email. Each time I did this, I replayed the interview in my head, finding better proofs of expertise each time which were useless in retrospect. I had more to learn but I had good ideas and I had hoped to be accepted for my potential. If they give me the job, I thought, I’ll ask them to buy me a microscope. For art. I thought about the dust that must have settled inside my nose and throat. I thought about how we were given hard hats but no masks. The tour was above ground the entire time, but the unlikely threat of a bad fall was easier to document for insurance than the long, slow violence of accumulating sediment that may or may not react. In a risk society, everything is evidence. You may not proceed without it.
III. Staging
‘Driving to a different spot. Pines just got taller.
The pile of coal is its own horizon.’
Does a guided tour qualify as fieldwork? What’s the view from the viewing platform? The industry of energy and its adjacent are heavily mechanized and riddled with techno-political intricacies that need some guidance, I suppose. The work of capitalism, after all, is alienation. At the same time, I am not only visiting a few hundred years old mine, but also the land that it yields to. How am I being guided through the (large) foreign context of a small place? If this place has been ‘depeopled’ by mining, and if I suspend disbelief to allow that claim, what is our role as researchers in ‘repeopling’ this place? How do we understand the context of these system transitions where people – villagers, engineers, employees, tour guides, researchers – are simply a detail to bargain with or a number to repurpose for other employments? Embedded within the time of the mine, are cycles of university funding, the height of the pines that tell you when mining started/ stopped , the efficient proximity of other resource regimes that will share or withhold resources from the mine depending on where they sit on the energy timeline. In a guided tour, the boundaries of field sites are cleanly marked. The guide, or the researcher’s own instinct for when to reach for their camera, will mark the territory of analysis.
IV. Exposure
‘The tour is moving too fast for me to properly observe (myself?). There is a milk bottle making factory.
Everyone is talking. I’m here.’
It’s strange, feeling lost in a guided tour. Even the bus is a compass; there are instructions on which side has the best view and the switching is fast and fomo-inducing. The mine ticks away, its sweep ever horizontal and it’s a struggle to hold all its contours. I try to understand where we are relative to where we were by following the sun, and that’s when I see the birds. Falcons, I think, or eagles? My gaze quickly turns from sky to earth from that point on, I am looking for nests or sustenance in the sand and I can’t find them. Maybe the birds too live far away and are just visiting. There are no insects, and it makes me sad. But the bus has lurched to a halt – I need to get off and turn objective.
If I am less than a dot relative to the solar system, what am I relative to this second sun in our sky?
V. Can you feel the future?
“In approximately 30 years, no more driving here, only swimming.”
I had to chuckle at the thought of post-industrial Europe remaking itself in the image of the tropics. The guide continued the story about how his father went swimming in a rehabilitated mine-turned-lake and the acidity of the water burned his skin raw. But it’s only a matter of time, hesaid, because the lake is fine to swim in today. What happened to one generation is only part of what the next will/not endure.
Paving over a polluted pond with concrete, or pouring freshwater into a mined basin is fundamentally a textural transition. The public discourse on climate change in the West doesn’t say much about how the crisis is felt through texture. June 2013 in Delhi, 40 degrees Celsius, 70% humidity, and the bottoms of my slippers melted as I crossed the street. Two years of reading histories of energy in the United States, in Russia, in Saudi, and then a work of fiction informs me that crude oil burns when it touches skin. At the funeral, I overhear the hushed tones of my grandmothers and learn that when a live wire touches the body of a farmer, it chars the skin and turns it black.
“In 1978, the idea of a lake was already here.”
Last day of fieldwork, we are at the Lausitzer Ostsee and our tour is guided by an urban planner who works for the city of Cottbus. The ground is full of pinecones. The lake is not blue. The Spreewald is only 17km away , but the valuation regime of rehabilitation cannot imagine a wetland here, only wet or dry fixed assets. My exhaustion peaks at the inlet where the Spree gushes into the lake. Suddenly this is ਜਗੇੜੇ ਦਾਾ ਪੁਲ, ਪੰਜਾਾਬ and I am five, only slightly taller than the low brick wall of the bridge I am peering over, watching the water of the canal below me gush through the released lock. Then and now, the smell and sound of redirected water (futures) remains consistent. I see our guide standing off to the side by himself and I realize I have questions. I ask him what he thinks of the project and if he had funding and freedom, what would he do? If you could stop this future and start another, I wanted to know, what would you do?
What would you do?
