Henriette Gunkel

The research project, anchored in media studies, aims to investigate what remains of colonial
extractive infrastructures. It asks what the remains reveal about the history of colonial violence and how the ‘legacy’ of that violence persists today and continues to shape the infrastructures of transnational extraction economies of the future, be that, mining the ocean floor or facilitating Europe’s “green transition”. This research project is particularly concerned with spectral elements that exist at the threshold of perception in the context of Namibia where the history of German colonial extractive infrastructure has left traces in different parts of the landscape. By attuning to these colonial remains and sites, particularly to those related to the oceanic, this project aims to explore their histories and scales of environmental destructions and explore artistic and community-based interventions which open possibilities for more sustainable extractive practices in the future while acknowledging the violence of the past.