by Prof. Dr. Henriette Gunkel,
Dr. Sam Nightingale, Takudzwa Mukesi
This TP, 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 for diamonds and rare earth elements or facilitating Europe’s "green transition". While some elements of the locations where extraction once took place are easily recognizable on site or in archival documents and maps–rails, telegraph wires, water pipes–other elements elude perception. The TP is concerned with such spectral elements that exist at the threshold of perception in the context of Namibia, where the history of German-British colonial extractive infrastructure has left traces in different parts of the landscape, e.g., in the Namib desert, the Atlantic Ocean, the salt pans along the coastline of the Northern Fields. Against this background, the aim of this TP is to examine how aesthetic practices of attunement, as used by artists and artist-researchers, function to open up new and different forms of perception and understanding of the hidden and repressed histories of extractive violence in Namibia by engaging with both inherited spectral infrastructures: the remains of the colonial and genocidal infrastructures of diamond mining in the Namib desert, and how these intersect with the current and prospective infrastructures that enable newly initiated green hydrogen projects in the south of Namibia. The concept of attunement is understood as an embodied media practice that combines technology-related media science with an awareness of the–human and non-human–body as a medium. The research aims to show how such attunement practices can uncover traces of colonial extractive infrastructure in the context of Namibia, and how these practices reveal how the history of German colonialism and genocide is reflected in the extractive zone; and how practices of attunement make tangible the survival of this history of colonial violence in today's extraction infrastructures.
Frame Project
by Henriette Gunkel (PI)
The research project with the tentative title Desert Memory: Infra-Aesthetics and Atmospheric Remains in the Afterlife of Namibia’s Genocide asks: What remains after genocide? How do we theorize violence that persists across radically different temporal scales—from geological deep time to memorial practices to speculativefuturity? And what knowledge practices are adequate to extraction that operates simultaneously as historical event, ongoing atmospheric presence, and infrastructural foundation for new violences?
Current debates about German colonial violence in Namibia focus on human remains held in European museums, approaching reparations as a matter of returning discrete objects. But the Namib desert itself is a mass grave. Colonial diamond extraction (beginning in 1908, following the OvaHerero and Nama genocide of 1904–08) created infrastructures whose traces persist not only in archives but in sand particles distributed through saltation, in atmospheric conditions, in abandoned concentration camps, and mining settlements. These spectral infrastructures continue to structure the present—most urgently in the Hyphen green hydrogen project, a massive "clean energy" extraction planned for 2027 in the same Sperrgebiet sites where genocide and forced labor occurred.
The book develops spectral chronopolitics and infra-aesthetics as a theoretical framework for analyzing how extractive infrastructures produce layered, haunted temporalities that resist linear narratives of colonial past and postcolonial present. Through close analysis of experimental film (Aryan Kaganof's Western 4.33, 2002), multimedia installation (Isabel T. Katjavivi’s They Tried to Bury Us, 2019), performance art (nesindano namise (khoes) and Tuli Mekondjo), and collaborative fieldwork in Lüderitz, Shark Island, Kolmanskop, and the Northern Fields diamond mining area, I argue that visual, sonic, and performative practices function as technologies of temporal attunement—they make perceptible dimensions of extractive violence that elude conventional historical or political-economic methods.
See also:
Subproject 1
by Dr. Sam Nightingale (Postdoctoral Researcher)
Engaging with the spectral remnants of colonial extractive infrastructures—and their projected futures—poses conceptual and methodological challenges. The spectral resists fixation: it operates between presence and absence, registering coexisting temporalities that are often imperceptible or only partially knowable. Such phenomena are not easily addressed through empirical protocols or linear narration alone; they call for inquiry and media practices attuned to thresholds, where atmospheres, perceptions, and material traces must be sensed and worked with through embodied and technological means.
This subproject develops “spectral attunement” as an innovative theoretical and practice-based methodology for engaging the coexisting, non-linear temporalities that endure in Namibia as spectral formations embedded in land, water, atmosphere, and in industrial remnants. It speaks directly to the extractive regimes—material and epistemological—investigated in the other two strands of this transdisciplinary project. The underlying premise is that extraction operates as a temporal medium: railways and pipelines, dredged coastlines and roads, tailings, processing facilities, and port logistics carry histories forward, shaping the present and conditioning what futures become possible.
Conceptually, the project develops an interdisciplinary genealogy—from Stimmung to affect theory—treating attunement as a dynamic methodology for sensing subtle yet materially active forces held in salt, sand, infrastructural remains, and plant metabolisms. In dialogue with Namibian partners—scholars, artists, custodians, and community organisations—this approach is operationalised through collaborative, site-specific “field labs” in Namibia, alongside listening, writing, and discursive workshops in Germany. Attunement is positioned here both as a mode of investigation and as a politics of action.
“Spectral attunement” thus formalises attunement not only as a rigorous theoretical framework but also as an embodied, situated, and ethical orientation for artistic media practice. It offers new ways of perceiving and understanding the concealed or repressed histories of settler-colonial and extractive violence, and develops methods adaptable across multiple infrastructural research contexts.
Subproject 2
by Takudzwa Mukesi (PhD candidate)
This project investigates how emerging green hydrogen infrastructures intersect with the spatial, material, and discursive remnants of colonial and genocidal violence in southern Namibia. It approaches renewable energy as a speculative infrastructure through which historical forms of extraction are reorganized into projected environmental futures. The research centres on the Hyphen Green Hydrogen Project planned for Tsau ǁKhaeb National Park, historically known as the Sperrgebiet, a restricted extractive zone south of Lüderitz and a former site of German colonial concentration camps and genocidal violence.
The project proposes a large-scale wind and solar complex spanning approximately 4,000 km², scheduled to be operational by 2027, with the capacity to produce one million tonnes of green ammonia annually for export primarily to Germany and Britain. While framed as a cornerstone of global post-fossil transition, the project raises critical questions about continuities between historical and contemporary extractive regimes. It examines how infrastructures enabling hydrogen production, including technological systems, labour organization, economic circulation, and transnational logistics networks, reconfigure earlier colonial spatialities while producing new regimes of visibility and erasure.
The research focuses on two interconnected sites. First, Lüderitz, shaped by enduring colonial and apartheid spatial logics, is undergoing transformation to accommodate industrial expansion and labour influx associated with the hydrogen economy. Second, infrastructural scaling across Tsau ǁKhaeb is examined in relation to sites where genocidal violence was enacted, including Shark Island, a former concentration camp adjacent to the harbour proposed for expansion. Through artist collaborations and hybrid documentation practices, the project develops Afro-Surreal witnessing methods. Drawing on Michelle Murphy’s concept of regimes of perceptibility, it analyses how technical, ecological, and social assemblages structure memory, disappearance, and speculative futures. Together, these approaches position infrastructure as a medium that governs presence and absence, revealing renewable energy landscapes as layered archives of violence, endurance, and contested futurity in formation.
See also:
by Prof. Dr. Henriette Gunkel,
Dr. Sam Nightingale, Takudzwa Mukesi
This TP, 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 for diamonds and rare earth elements or facilitating Europe’s "green transition". While some elements of the locations where extraction once took place are easily recognizable on site or in archival documents and maps–rails, telegraph wires, water pipes–other elements elude perception. The TP is concerned with such spectral elements that exist at the threshold of perception in the context of Namibia, where the history of German-British colonial extractive infrastructure has left traces in different parts of the landscape, e.g., in the Namib desert, the Atlantic Ocean, the salt pans along the coastline of the Northern Fields. Against this background, the aim of this TP is to examine how aesthetic practices of attunement, as used by artists and artist-researchers, function to open up new and different forms of perception and understanding of the hidden and repressed histories of extractive violence in Namibia by engaging with both inherited spectral infrastructures: the remains of the colonial and genocidal infrastructures of diamond mining in the Namib desert, and how these intersect with the current and prospective infrastructures that enable newly initiated green hydrogen projects in the south of Namibia. The concept of attunement is understood as an embodied media practice that combines technology-related media science with an awareness of the–human and non-human–body as a medium. The research aims to show how such attunement practices can uncover traces of colonial extractive infrastructure in the context of Namibia, and how these practices reveal how the history of German colonialism and genocide is reflected in the extractive zone; and how practices of attunement make tangible the survival of this history of colonial violence in today's extraction infrastructures.
Frame Project
by Henriette Gunkel (PI)
The research project with the tentative title Desert Memory: Infra-Aesthetics and Atmospheric Remains in the Afterlife of Namibia’s Genocide asks: What remains after genocide? How do we theorize violence that persists across radically different temporal scales—from geological deep time to memorial practices to speculativefuturity? And what knowledge practices are adequate to extraction that operates simultaneously as historical event, ongoing atmospheric presence, and infrastructural foundation for new violences?
Current debates about German colonial violence in Namibia focus on human remains held in European museums, approaching reparations as a matter of returning discrete objects. But the Namib desert itself is a mass grave. Colonial diamond extraction (beginning in 1908, following the OvaHerero and Nama genocide of 1904–08) created infrastructures whose traces persist not only in archives but in sand particles distributed through saltation, in atmospheric conditions, in abandoned concentration camps, and mining settlements. These spectral infrastructures continue to structure the present—most urgently in the Hyphen green hydrogen project, a massive "clean energy" extraction planned for 2027 in the same Sperrgebiet sites where genocide and forced labor occurred.
The book develops spectral chronopolitics and infra-aesthetics as a theoretical framework for analyzing how extractive infrastructures produce layered, haunted temporalities that resist linear narratives of colonial past and postcolonial present. Through close analysis of experimental film (Aryan Kaganof's Western 4.33, 2002), multimedia installation (Isabel T. Katjavivi’s They Tried to Bury Us, 2019), performance art (nesindano namise (khoes) and Tuli Mekondjo), and collaborative fieldwork in Lüderitz, Shark Island, Kolmanskop, and the Northern Fields diamond mining area, I argue that visual, sonic, and performative practices function as technologies of temporal attunement—they make perceptible dimensions of extractive violence that elude conventional historical or political-economic methods.
See also:
Subproject 1
by Dr. Sam Nightingale (Postdoctoral Researcher)
Engaging with the spectral remnants of colonial extractive infrastructures—and their projected futures—poses conceptual and methodological challenges. The spectral resists fixation: it operates between presence and absence, registering coexisting temporalities that are often imperceptible or only partially knowable. Such phenomena are not easily addressed through empirical protocols or linear narration alone; they call for inquiry and media practices attuned to thresholds, where atmospheres, perceptions, and material traces must be sensed and worked with through embodied and technological means.
This subproject develops “spectral attunement” as an innovative theoretical and practice-based methodology for engaging the coexisting, non-linear temporalities that endure in Namibia as spectral formations embedded in land, water, atmosphere, and in industrial remnants. It speaks directly to the extractive regimes—material and epistemological—investigated in the other two strands of this transdisciplinary project. The underlying premise is that extraction operates as a temporal medium: railways and pipelines, dredged coastlines and roads, tailings, processing facilities, and port logistics carry histories forward, shaping the present and conditioning what futures become possible.
Conceptually, the project develops an interdisciplinary genealogy—from Stimmung to affect theory—treating attunement as a dynamic methodology for sensing subtle yet materially active forces held in salt, sand, infrastructural remains, and plant metabolisms. In dialogue with Namibian partners—scholars, artists, custodians, and community organisations—this approach is operationalised through collaborative, site-specific “field labs” in Namibia, alongside listening, writing, and discursive workshops in Germany. Attunement is positioned here both as a mode of investigation and as a politics of action.
“Spectral attunement” thus formalises attunement not only as a rigorous theoretical framework but also as an embodied, situated, and ethical orientation for artistic media practice. It offers new ways of perceiving and understanding the concealed or repressed histories of settler-colonial and extractive violence, and develops methods adaptable across multiple infrastructural research contexts.
Subproject 2
by Takudzwa Mukesi (PhD candidate)
This project investigates how emerging green hydrogen infrastructures intersect with the spatial, material, and discursive remnants of colonial and genocidal violence in southern Namibia. It approaches renewable energy as a speculative infrastructure through which historical forms of extraction are reorganized into projected environmental futures. The research centres on the Hyphen Green Hydrogen Project planned for Tsau ǁKhaeb National Park, historically known as the Sperrgebiet, a restricted extractive zone south of Lüderitz and a former site of German colonial concentration camps and genocidal violence.
The project proposes a large-scale wind and solar complex spanning approximately 4,000 km², scheduled to be operational by 2027, with the capacity to produce one million tonnes of green ammonia annually for export primarily to Germany and Britain. While framed as a cornerstone of global post-fossil transition, the project raises critical questions about continuities between historical and contemporary extractive regimes. It examines how infrastructures enabling hydrogen production, including technological systems, labour organization, economic circulation, and transnational logistics networks, reconfigure earlier colonial spatialities while producing new regimes of visibility and erasure.
The research focuses on two interconnected sites. First, Lüderitz, shaped by enduring colonial and apartheid spatial logics, is undergoing transformation to accommodate industrial expansion and labour influx associated with the hydrogen economy. Second, infrastructural scaling across Tsau ǁKhaeb is examined in relation to sites where genocidal violence was enacted, including Shark Island, a former concentration camp adjacent to the harbour proposed for expansion. Through artist collaborations and hybrid documentation practices, the project develops Afro-Surreal witnessing methods. Drawing on Michelle Murphy’s concept of regimes of perceptibility, it analyses how technical, ecological, and social assemblages structure memory, disappearance, and speculative futures. Together, these approaches position infrastructure as a medium that governs presence and absence, revealing renewable energy landscapes as layered archives of violence, endurance, and contested futurity in formation.
See also: