a choreographic walk
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
You hear a recording of place N.10 on our map: Has the land ever been thanked? And do rocks listen? Here where we overlook the excavation, let us fill this wound with the waves of our voices, singing together an ocean of sound, infused with our hopes and intentions.
Within the Squatfabrik residency, I was connecting with the Giele Botter, a landscape shaped by former open-pit mining, to reflect on body-land relationality, extractivism, care, reciprocity and responsibility. The research explored collective engagement with these notions through a facilitated choreographic walk. Through the mediums of the storied matter of this landscape, our bodies and our voices, we interwove poetic and embodied storytelling with multi-sensorial listening, humming/sounding and moving with.
Rooting within transcorporeality, the interconnectedness of human bodies with the material world, and within deep time, the time of matter, within which the short extractive period is based, we listened with the now partly regenerated Giele Botter. As extractivism has been accelerating and displaced to territories where environmental and human rights are violated, particularly across the Global South, such as by two multinational steel corporations headquartered in Luxembourg, we were further giving voice, listening to and engaging with what is out of sight and sound. To zoom into the reality of what is happening in Liberia, one of a few examples mentioned in the Real Cost of Steel report, I have been in conversation with activist Dada Konkah, who is fighting for his communities’ rights in the Nimba region and who has sent me testimonies of their accounts of how their land, livelihoods and lives are affected by the mining industry. My objective with this research is to further enquire into the need for a duty of care and for worldling, together with the land, fairer futures for all.
With deep thanks to the team of the Squatfabrik, to the precious collaborators Dada Konkah, Alexandra Baybutt, Annick Pütz and Ines Lopez, and to our dear participants.
📷 1-7 + 9- 22-© Kulturfabrik / Nicolas Blanc
📷 8 © Michael Nique
This project grew out of the terres rouges, we listen with you research.
Further information and resources:
The Real Cost of Steel 2024 (in English)
Initiative pour un devoir de vigilance Luxembourg (in French)