12.7.2025 at the Giele Botter
as part of my Squatfabrik research residency 16.6 – 12.7.2025 at Kulturfabrik (LU),
growing out of the terres rouges, i listen with you research project
How might choreographic attunement and worlding with a scarred and recovering former mining landscape within the Terres Rouges tend to reciprocity and open toward bearing witness to distant communities whose worlds are entangled with ours through active extractive chains, gesturing toward environmental justice?
Together with collaborators, we developed and facilitated a choreographic walk with the Giele Botter — a former open-pit iron ore quarry — inviting participants to collectively explore the research question with us.
Rooted in the body as material world, continuous with land and deep time — the vast geological temporality that forms these strata over hundreds of millions of years, laid bare by the brief period of extraction — we walked with matter we also carry within us — the iron in our blood sharing its origins with the iron ore of this landscape, the water in our cells the same as the ancient seas whose waves carried and deposited this iron ore here. From within this shared matter, we attuned to this storied and recovering landscape through listening, sounding and moving and writing-with.
As extractivism has not ended but accelerated and shifted, we bore witness by giving voice to what has been displaced beyond sight and sound — to territories where environmental and human rights are violated by ArcelorMittal, the corporation that owns this very land, headquartered in Luxembourg. Through testimonies activist Dada Konkah shared from his community in the Nimba region of Liberia, we make present the entanglement of this recovering landscape with ongoing extraction elsewhere.
How can we, with this landscape, imagine and gesture toward care and justice?
You hear a recording of place N.10 on our map: Has the land ever been thanked? And do rocks listen?
With deep thanks to the participants, to the team of the Squatfabrik, and to collaborators Dada Konkah, Alexandra Baybutt, Annick Pütz and Ines Lopez .
📷 1-7 + 9- 22-© Kulturfabrik / Nicolas Blanc
📷 8 © Michael Nique
For further information:
The Real Cost of Steel 2024 (in English)
Initiative pour un devoir de vigilance Luxembourg (in French)