12.7.2025 at the Giele Botter

as part of my Squatfabrik research residency 16.6 – 12.7.2025 at Kulturfabrik (LU)

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 and responsibility. The research explored how to engage with these notions collectively through a facilitated choreographic walk. We interwove poetic and embodied storytelling with multi-sensorial listening, humming/sounding and moving with the storied matter of this landscape, through the mediums of our bodies and our voices.

Rooting within deep time, the time of matter, within which the short extractive period is based, and by listening with the now partly regenerated Giele Botter, we are engaging with what is out of sight and sound. Extractivism however 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. To share the reality of what is happening in Liberia for example, I have been in conversation with an activist, who is fighting for his communities’ rights in the Nimba region. 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