Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding

#8 2025 Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 1 MATEUSZ CHABERSKI Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding The article proposes spoiling as a mode of attunement to conflicting eco-social relations in the Anthropocene. Spoiling interrupts the anthropo(s)cenic regime that explains away intricate natural-cultural phenomena from a single, universal(ised) perspective. The author discusses spoiling by analysing and comparing selected performative projects the Ruhr (Germany) and the Upper Silesian Coal Basin (Poland). Using tactics of rewilding and grounding, these projects spoil dominant discourses and practices of re-naturalising the regions’ polluted rivers. The article shows how the projects situate the rivers within eco-social processes of exclusion, marginalisation and violence while fostering more just futures for both regions. Anthropocene Anthropo(s)cene Extraction Post-extractive Landscapes Rewilding Eco-social Justice Performative Arts Mateusz Chaberski Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 2 FIG. 1 Lignite mine Turów, Poland, 2006. Beyond the Green Anthropo(s)cene In 2020, the Polish government announced that the open-cast Turów coal mine (Fig. 1), situated at the tripoint between Poland, Czechia and Germany, which was originally planned to close in 2026, would continue and expand its operations until 2044, when the lignite deposits are expected to have run out. The decision of the former far-right government, taken without public consultation or environmental research, caused a legitimate outcry from the Czech and German communities living in the region, who complained that the Turów coal mine threatens their livelihoods.1 Its operations deplete groundwater, increase the risk of soil subsidence and its spoils produce excessive dust. Thus, in 2020, the Czech government filed a legal complaint against the Polish government’s policies at the Court of Justice of the European Union. The court subsequently ordered the Turów coal mine to be closed immediately and its expansion halted, which led to an agreement between the Polish and Czech governments. In 2023, however, another complaint against the Polish government was filed by the German city of Zittau. Although the complaints have firm environmental grounds, closing Turów coal mine would threaten the livelihoods of the local Polish inhabitants, for whom it is still the main source of energy and the largest employer in the region. Thus, for them, its closing would mean the end of the world. At the time of writing, the conflict is held in abeyance. Nearly two years after the change of power, the new, more liberal Polish government is still drafting a scenario for the region’s eco-socially just decarbonisation. Mateusz Chaberski Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 3 The clashing perspectives of the groups involved in the conflict clearly unsettle the mainstream discourse of the Anthropocene – the new epoch in Earth’s history in which the human has become the dominant geological force on our planet, now often synonymous with the anthropogenic destruction of environments. As the cultural theorist Claire Colebrook argues in her 2023 book Who Would You Kill to Save the World, the discourse is not only anthropocentric – in that it gives an undefined anthropos an upper hand over Earth’s systems on a planetary scale – but, first and foremost, it is “anthroposcenic”.2 Colebrook specifically refers to the modern scopic regime inherent to the epoch, which “assumes that a varied, complex, volatile, fragile, and incalculable living system can be viewed, if not mastered, by a humanity that is now unified not by an underlying essence but by its comportment to the future”.3 In other words, in our current epoch the world (always singular) becomes a scene that is a passive backdrop, simply there for the human to enjoy and survey. Needless to say, the human is purported to be a white heterosexual middle or upper-class male. Thus, Colebrook claims that a more apt name of the new epoch would be “the Anthroposcene”.4 The term clearly plays on the homophonous relation between the suffix -cene and the noun scene, the latter referring to a view or picture of a place, event or activity. The pun aims to articulate the primacy of such a parochial human perspective of looking at the world. Drawing on contemporary decolonial theories, Colebrook succinctly traces the origins of the Anthroposcene in Western Enlightenment thought, which was embroiled in the racist discourses and practices of European colonialism. She specifically refers to Enlightenment universalism, which naturalised the Western liberal, self-determined subject as capable of recognising and interpreting the world, in contrast to inert Nature and externally determined racialised bodies, ready to be colonised and enslaved by the Western subject. Analysing 20th and 21st century post-apocalyptic (re)presentations in film and literature, Colebrook succinctly argues that the anthroposcenic regime prevails in contemporary save-the-world narratives which “become occasion[s] to reiterate the point of view of liberal individualism”.5 These narratives produce a collective threatened we, attached to certain Western (consumerist) ways of living, whose perspective dominates the whole scene of representation. Although the narratives – for instance the film Apocalypse Now (1970) based on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness – are often aware that we have also brought other human and more-than-human worlds to an end, they nevertheless treat them as mere backdrop or collateral damage in the drama of ‘our’ survival. In this context, the Turów coal mine debacle clearly demonstrates that saving the world always happens at the expense of others. Moreover, every solution to the conflict, even those introduced at a regional or European level, will have eco-social costs. This proves that the fantasy of a unitary anthroposcenic world no longer holds. What we term the world rather resembles a Cubist painting composed of multiple fragments seen from different embodied points of view – and for different purposes. Those Mateusz Chaberski Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 4 perspectives are not subjective ways to look at a single world; they rather produce specific incommensurable worlds. In this context, we desperately need new modes of attunement to these worldmaking points of view. I specifically refer to Anna L. Tsing’s understanding of attunement as “attempts to get to know, through alignment, how others [human and non – MC] express themselves in the world”.6 In this context, alignment is not about being in harmony but rather about being close enough to facilitate mutual understanding and negotiations across difference. Such mutuality is especially pertinent to conflicts such as the one around the Turów coal mine. Only then can we responsibly address the provocative question asked by Colebrook in the title of her book – Who Would You Kill to Save the World? – reframed here as: who would we kill to save our world? Taking the Turów coal mine as my vantage point, this paper proposes one such mode of attunement which aims to interrupt any anthroposcenic regime claiming the right to explain away the intricate and dynamic natural-cultural phenomena of the Anthropocene from a single, unified and universal(ised) perspective – without losing sight of the agency of matter which shapes the world(s) we live in. Unlike Colebrook, however, to articulate the close relation between the Anthropocene and its scopic regime, I will be consistently using the term the Anthropo(s)cene and its adjectival form anthropo(s)cenic. The brackets aim to keep the ambivalence in place while preventing the reader’s eye from slipping into the common understanding of the name of the new epoch. Thus, the term itself works as a mode of interruption. And interrupting is especially important in the context of ongoing contemporary projects that aim to transform European post-extractive landscapes, especially former mining and steelwork areas, into a particular kind of green Anthropo(s)cene. These areas undergo a process which environmental scholars Anna-Katharina Wöbse and Patrick Kupper refer to as “greening”.7 The term denotes ecological projects, dating back to at least the mid-20th century, that revolve around the protection and conservation of green ecology, epitomised by lush, emerald green forests as a remedy to the havoc wrought by civilisation. One example is the European Green Belt Initiative, funded profusely by the European Union, which aims to connect conservation areas from the Arctic to the Balkan Peninsula as a more efficient way of protecting biodiversity. In the context of post-extractive landscapes, greening takes the form of such practices as remediation, revitalisation and re-naturalisation of damaged environments. These practices, each in a slightly different respect, aim to neutralise waste and post-industrial toxic pollutants in water, air and soil in order to restore healthy (green) environments for humans and more-than-humans in such a way as to stimulate the areas’ economic, social and cultural rejuvenation. Thus, the dominant narrative underpinning these projects is deeply embroiled in the neoliberal logic of late capitalism and centres on the complete renunciation of fossil fuels and their remains in the name of a cleaner and more eco-socially liveable, sustainable future. Needless to say, the future is geared towards the gains of developers, among other corporate actors, who are willing to build new Mateusz Chaberski Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 5 estates on recultivated land or boost the prices of existing ones now in close vicinity of green(ed) areas. FIG. 2 Remediated spoil heap, Góra Antonia in Ruda Śląska (Upper Silesian Coal Basin), where spontaneous vegetation was razed to make space for phytostabilising plants, 2022. As more critical environmental scholars point out, ‘saving’ post-extractive landscapes through greening entails sacrificing many humans and more-thanhumans, including literally killing some of them. Greening usually disregards ruderal species and non-native plants such as wild carrot (Daucus carota), which, through mycorrhizal alliances with fungi, have painstakingly overgrown post-extractive sites.8 This spontaneous vegetation, considered ecologically degraded and unesthetic, is often razed to give way to ‘proper’ biodiverse phytostablising plants that are supposed to remediate the soil more efficiently. Likewise, human inhabitants of these landscapes – often poor and working class – and their intimate, caring everyday relationships with the land, especially its non-green elements, are also usually discredited.9 The interests of local communities, still attached to the remnants of their prosperous industrial past, are regularly dismissed during obligatory public consultations as unsustainable; they are considered stumbling blocks on the path towards a ‘truly’ green transition. Moreover, focusing on the technical aspects of greening, the anthropo(s)cenic narratives often overlook eco-social injustices and the fast and slow violence caused by past industrial developments. They also obscure the role of industrial actors – usually then put in charge of greening – and their responsibility for having devastated the land in the first place.10 In this context, interrupting the smooth green Anthropo(s)cene seems a necessary option not only to attune to the unwanted human and more-thanhumans inhabiting post-extractive landscapes, but also to do justice to the Mateusz Chaberski Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 6 human victims of long-standing social processes of marginalisation and exclusion. Only then can we begin to envision eco-socially just post-extractive futures. In the remainder of this article, I will critically engage with the green Anthropo(s)cene through a close examination of selected post-extractive landscapes in two of the three countries involved in the conflict around the Turów coal mine: Germany and Poland. My focus will be on the countries’ largest coal and steel centres – the Ruhr and Upper Silesian Coal Basin respectively. They have been specifically chosen for two reasons. On the one hand, at various times in history they were considered peripheral, vis à vis English modernisation, and exploited – both in the capitalist and socialist forms of governance. Thus, they share a similar history of ‘a peaceful conquest’, which brought coal mining and steelwork technologies from England to “innerEurope”.11 On the other hand, the two represent different stages of deindustrialisation which have left their mark in cultural imaginaries. While the Ruhr region is considered virtually deindustrialised with the last mining operations having stopped in 2018, in the Upper Silesian Coal Basin, mining operations are still in place. Such a comparative approach is especially important in the context of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call an Empire – a postmodern regime of power which has transformed the differences inherent to localities into mere (consumer) preferences on a market of ideas.12 By looking closely at the two similar yet different postextractive landscapes, I aim to foreground their local specificities and heterogeneities, thus gesturing towards a possibility of undermining the imperial regime. My approach, however, differs from that of environmental humanities scholars who study multispecies justice13 or intersectional ecologies14 using methods of ethnography or social sciences. Those scholars usually treat their stories and interviews as representations of pre-existing eco-social realities, thus losing sight of their performative potential to intervene in the world, something which becomes evident to a performativity scholar. Thus, in the following, I analyse and compare selected ecologically driven performative projects engaging with the two regions’ post-industrial rivers: the Ruhr’s Emscher and the Rawa in the Upper Silesian Coal Basin. Although both rivers were radically transformed into industrial canals at the turn of the 20th century to serve the mining industries, they are now at different stages of re-naturalisation due to differing histories of deindustrialisation. The former is completely remediated while the latter is still heavily polluted. For specific (eco)political purposes the projects in question capture different local dynamics and ever-shifting configurations of humans and more-than-humans which make up these landscapes. They might be understood as what the Canadian cultural theorist Siobhan Angus has recently termed “zones of tension”.15 In her work Camera Geologica, Angus, drawing on the findings of the decolonial environmental scholar Tiffany Lethabo King, introduces the term to embrace projects that are “at once an art, Mateusz Chaberski Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 7 science, and technology; evidentiary and aesthetic; a material object and representation; fixed and contingent.”16 As the title of her book suggests, Angus refers predominantly to contemporary projects in experimental photography which re-use materials such as bitumen, silver and rare earth minerals – substances historically used in developing photographs. Thus, these projects foreground photography’s material embroilment as a medium in the destructive practices of Western extractivism, an entanglement which has been effectively concealed by the modernist art-historical discourse of photography as an unmediated lens onto the world. The projects discussed in the following perform a slightly different task. By generating tensions between the arts, sciences and technologies, they bring about frictions between humans and more-than-humans that are often concealed by the discourses and practices of greening post-extractive landscapes. In this way, they interrupt the green Anthropo(s)cene by situating the rivers within the region’s traditions of the oppressed communities which have been marginalised or subjected to both fast and slow violence, such as working-class inhabitants – especially miners’ wives and children – who bore the brunt of the rivers’ toxicity. However, the projects also gesture towards more eco-socially sustainable futures for the regions, beyond greening. From Hacking to Spoiling In recent environmental (post)humanities research, we have witnessed a spate of practices at the intersection of the arts and sciences that aim to interrupt the dominant universalising and unifying discourse of the Anthropocene. These practices significantly differ from the proliferation of alternative names of the new epoch coined with the use of the suffix -cene in the 2010s. Names such as the Capitalocene, Plantationcene and Chthulucene17 have effectively challenged the idea that it is an unspecified anthropos which is the dominant geological and meteorological force on our planet. Instead, they clearly demonstrated that it is specific human-induced processes – such as the accumulation of capital, the proliferation of plantation agroecological practices or human relations with chthonic critters – that are altering Earth systems on a planetary scale. However, with the suffix -cene in place, these alternatives still perpetuate the logic of geology as a modern science complicit in creating a unified way of looking at the word from a distance. In contrast, recent critical propositions focus less on replacing the Anthropocene with another epochal formation and more on fragmenting it. In his essay Break up the Anthropocene, the American ecocritic Steve Mentz defines this methodological movement as an attempt to “pluralize and make legible the swirling cauldron of discourses that populate our environmental present”.18 In other words, breaking up the Anthropocene is about multiplying possible – even partial and situated – conceptions of our current epoch that overlap, connect and entangle in both harmonious and discordant ways. Such an approach not only challenges the unifying tenets of the Anthropocene but also allows for repurposing the discourse for other, more subversive, uses. Mateusz Chaberski Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 8 One such proposition for breaking up the Anthropocene was put forward by Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Sue Reid, Pia van Gelder and Astrida Neimanis as editors of the collective volume Feminist, Queer and Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene: Archive. In her introduction to the volume, Neimanis aptly points out that wholesale rejection of the discourse on the new epoch is not the best option for artists and critical thinkers.19 For some people, the discourse of the Anthropocene has not only raised awareness of the ongoing climate predicament but even incited them to take ecological action. Thus, a more productive way of engaging with the Anthropocene discourse is to hack it. In this context, hacking becomes a denominator for a set of “tactics that might more modestly, but no less transformatively, interrupt the practices and assumptions that shored up the Anthropocene”.20 Needless to say, the first assumption to hack is the fiction of the anthropos as a universal and unified humanity and the naturalised ‘we’ of Western culture. This, in turn, would allow other racialised, minoritarian and subaltern bodies – and their relations with their environments – into the conversation about anthropogenic climate change and its socio-political and cultural underpinnings. Hacking draws on the long tradition of feminist, queer and anticolonial thought and practice, which involves searching for loopholes in hegemonic systems of power and using them against those systems. However, Neimanis cautions that hacking is not modelled solely on the technological discourses and practices of hackers, which may metaphorically and literally be used to subvert hegemonic systems of power. Hacking also draws on other inflections of the English verb to hack which also means to withstand, to chop into pieces – channelling anger – and to cough up irritating matter. This semantic abundance serves Hamilton, Reid, van Gelder and Neimanis not only to diversify feminist, queer and anticolonial tactics of challenging the Anthropocene, but also to foster and trace productive crossovers between them. How such hacking might look is best illustrated by the collective volume itself. Not accidentally – as its subtitle suggests – it is an archive of sorts. It gathers over 20 literary and artistic interventions into the Anthropocene discourse which were presented and performed during live events in which the volume’s contributors participated between 2016 and 2018. However, as Neimanis points out in the afore mentioned introduction, their archive is not about conserving a petrified version of the past. Drawing on a long tradition of counter-hegemonic projects of community building and alternative history writing, she argues that “archives are a way to tell a story otherwise, and to insist it keeps getting told. Radical archives and archiving resist, recreate, and reimagine”.21 Neimanis is specifically referring to mostly textual documentation of presentations, performances, poetry readings and storytelling sessions organised during hacking symposia held in Sydney, Australia, in 2016, 2017 and 2018. Gathered in their collective volume, these works do not create a critical yet coherent vision of the Anthropocene; rather, they become a polyphonic structure of many embodied, partial perspectives, some in sync, others at odds with one another. One discussed work was the olfactory performance Mateusz Chaberski Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 9 Volatizing Bouquet by Stephanie Springgay, which exposed audiences to a noxious scent of mown grass to challenge their anthropocentric ways of thinking about plants.22 On the other hand, Lindsay Kelley’s intervention Extreme Baking mobilised more neutral affects of eating wheat-based biscuits and crackers to critically expose “the nutritional environment of European colonial expansion”.23 Although hacking effectively makes room for different feminist, queer and anticolonial interventions into the Anthropocene discourse, it mainly focuses on the sensory experience and materiality of the human body. Thus, it loses sight of the materiality of specific landscapes and their agency in shaping human and more-than-human relations. Attunement to materiality is especially important in the context of post-extractive landscapes, where different kinds of matter, such as post-industrial waste and human remains, are often disregarded in favour of the green Anthropo(s)cene. To bring these matters centre stage, hacking might not be enough. To rephrase Neimanis: Don’t hack the Anthropocene, spoil it! Similar to hacking, spoiling denotes a mode of interrupting the unifying logic of the Anthropocene by drawing on various inflections of the English word spoil and its verb form to spoil. The term spoiling directly refers to spoil as gangue, surplus rock and tailings – waste materials that emerge from digging the Earth and processing mined ores, which are then tipped onto heaps. As such, spoiling the Anthropocene aims to highlight the political, cultural and social importance of waste created by coal and ore mining and processing. Suffice it to mention heavy metal substances such as lead, which were – or in some cases still are – systematically discharged into post-industrial rivers. This post-extractive spoil is less prominent in discussions of the new epoch than other industrial effluvia, such as carbon dioxide, which is considered one of the main indicators of the current geological era. Yet spoiling the Anthropocene does not regard spoil as merely discarded or unwanted waste. For spoil can easily become the spoils of extractivism – both for various capitalist actors that specialise in recovering valuable minerals or metals from the waste, and for impoverished post-mining communities, for whom gathering coal on spoil heaps often becomes the main source of subsistence. In this respect, post-industrial rivers have also been beneficial to local communities as they allowed for the outsourcing of postextractive waste which would otherwise have been put directly into the soil – posing even more disastrous health effects for human and more-than-human inhabitants alike. Moreover, spoiling also denotes a particular double agency of post-extractive landscapes, understood as affordance, i.e., the way such landscapes let humans and more-than-humans do something, or conversely, prevent them from doing so. Performative projects, discussed in the following, capture such affordances of post-extractive landscapes as they show how they threaten various practices of value extraction. Despite restoration, postindustrial rivers still pose great risk of flooding, especially problematic for housing estates built on remediated post-mining land. However, while postextractive landscapes may spoil some human and more-than-human worldmaking projects, they also spoil other human and more-than-human Mateusz Chaberski Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 16 issue which has only recently entered public debate due to investigative journalism.36 Almost 60,000 pits, shafts, galleries and tunnels from inactive mining sites have been filled with highly contaminated water, which rises up and must be continuously pumped out. If the water level rises too high, it may not only spoil the quality of the groundwater but also flood the entire Ruhr region. In this context, it becomes clear why the curators Leonie Böhmer and Lisa Maria Weber insist on the connection between the installation’s wavebreakers and Noah’s Ark.37 By no means is Aladağ’s intervention a symbol of hope and safety after a catastrophe, as per conventional interpretations of the biblical story; on the contrary, the installation spoils the illusory sense of security guaranteed by technology. As ecocritics Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates point out in their 2023 Noah’s Arkive, retelling the story of the ark in the context of environmental destruction draws attention to “who gets included and who excluded, about how the threat of the flood is experienced differently by varied groups of people and animals”.38 In this context, Aladağ’s installation raises important questions about who and what is actually protected by the technology used for re-naturalising the Emscher. Thus, rewilding as a tactic for spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene is not only about restoring agency to post-extractive landscapes conceived as scenes, but also about constantly unsettling received notions of environmental protection – all which may bring about more eco-socially just futures for humans and morethan-humans. Whereas rewilding is an apt tactic in the Ruhr region, with its more than 50 years of deindustrialisation, it would have little relevance in the Upper Silesian Coal Basin, where environmentally destructive mining operations are still in place. Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene: Grounding Although the Upper Silesian Coal Basin underwent a sharp and brutal neoliberal transformation after 1989, when thousands of people lost their jobs in mining and steelworks, deindustrialisation à l’allemande has only begun in the last five years, with just a few greening projects underway. Significantly in the context of my article, neither of these projects include the re-naturalisation of the river Rawa, a nearly 20-kilometre-long body of water flowing through the Upper Silesian metropolitan area. The river is often referred to as a ‘dead river’ due to the lack of aquafauna caused by its unnaturally fast current and the amount of toxic waste which nowadays is no longer industrial but mainly communal sewage. Although there have been ambitious plans to restore the Rawa to its early 19th century state when it was still a wild stream, no coherent, state-funded initiative has been launched, as of the time of writing. This is predominantly due to the natural-cultural specificity of the river. For over half of the river’s course, she does not even have a riverbed, natural or artificial;39 she flows through an underground pipeline hidden under bicycle paths and pavements. This not only makes re-naturalisation extremely expensive but also poses serious infrastructural problems such as where to Mateusz Chaberski Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 17 establish her new riverbed. More problematic, however, is that the half-hidden Rawa does not afford local communities any relationship, let alone an intimate and caring one, which is crucial for garnering public support for a costintensive re-naturalisation initiative. The palpable effect of this lack of relationship is that local media, backed by scientists, regularly claim that the Rawa should not even be referred to as a river, as its source, hidden in a pond in Ruda Śląska, is depleting.40 The status of the Rawa as a (non)river in local imaginaries requires a radically different tactic of spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene – one that, in contrast to the Emscher, does not interrupt an already accomplished greening but rather prefigures a potential future restoration. Thus, it offers a slither of hope that the pitfalls of the re-naturalised Emscher will not be repeated. Similar to the Ruhr, practices of spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene in the context of the Rawa may be traced back to an exhibition organised in 2022: Temat: rzeka. Rawa w ujęciu interdyscyplinarnym [Subject: River. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Rawa river] curated by Grzegorz Hańderek, Adam Pisarek and Małgorzata Szandala. The subtitle of the exhibition gestures towards it being a joint venture – this one between the Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Silesia, both in Katowice. That specifically these two institutions organised the exhibition was hardly a coincidence. Both have long been engaged with the region’s social and environmental histories and also their premises are situated in close vicinity to the visible part of the Rawa, flowing through a concrete canal in the centre of Katowice, which is also the capital of Upper Silesia. Spatial vicinity becomes an apt starting point for establishing a relationship with the river. Whereas the exhibition organised at the Zeche Zollverein looked back on 30 years of the Emscher’s re-naturalisation, Temat: Rzeka was rather a call to action for local authorities and included numerous speculative visions of how re-naturalisation of the Rawa could look. To grasp the difference between spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene in the Ruhr and in Upper Silesia, the last part of this article focuses on works either exhibited at Temat: Rzeka or organised during Festiwal Rawy [Rawa fest], an annual art festival which evolved from this collaboration between academics, artists and activists. Among the former is Wiersza [The fish trap] (2022), a performative project by artists Paweł Szeibel and Joanna Zdzienicka-Obałek (Fig. 5). Its title refers to cone-shaped baskets, usually made of willow, hazel or birch twigs woven together with juniper string or hop stem – materials traditionally used by Polish riverine communities for fishing. Szeibel and Zdzienicka-Obałek’s aim, however, was to repurpose the practice of fish trap making for the restoration of the Rawa. Drawing on existing botanical research, they decided to make their own baskets of bulrush, a tall reed-like water plant with a characteristic brown, velvety, cylindrical head that grows in Polish wetlands and along riverbanks. The plant was not only chosen for its water purifying properties. The artists envisaged creating a plantation of bulrush alongside the Rawa, which would initiate the development of backswamps and lakes within Mateusz Chaberski Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 18 the river, thus stimulating its restoration. Soon, however, they abandoned the idea, focusing instead on the practice of weaving. After taking courses in basketry at a local craftmaking association, they organised weaving sessions during which they experimented with different potentialities of the medium. The effects of their work in progress were shown in the exhibition in the form of an abstract woven structure vaguely resembling a meandering river. FIG. 5 Paweł Szeibel and Joanna Zdzienicka-Obałek, Wiersza [The fish trap], 2022, performative project. As Szeibel and Zdzienicka-Obałek commented on the project in their artist statement, “this very process brings us closer to the image of the [river’s] beginning, where biology intertwines with abstraction making up another, new common ground.”41 In other words, Wiersza speculatively posits the restoration of the Rawa as an effect of bringing together artists, local researchers and local experts. However, by focusing on the process rather than finished object, Szeibel and Zdzienicka-Obałek spoil the anthropo(s)cenic logic of a completely renaturalised green landscape. Instead, they advocate for the restoration of the Mateusz Chaberski Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 19 Rawa as an ongoing series of negotiations involving different groups of experts and non-experts. In comparison to Wellenbrecher [Wave-Breaker], which focuses on the materiality of the landscape, Wiersza puts greater emphasis on the embodied physical experience of being and making together, which is crucial for creating new common ground. Thus, the project offers another tactic of spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene: an idea which may tentatively be called grounding. On the one hand, grounding gestures towards the well-known performative practice – rooted in meditative exercises – used by performers to connect with their physical bodies, surroundings and emotions through breathing exercises, body scans and unmediated contact with the ground. Unlike performers of the 1960s and 1970s, the performative projects engaging with post-extractive landscapes such as the Rawa do not use grounding to reinforce the universalist and essentialist conception of the human body’s presence, understood as a bounded entity with a pre-established existence. On the contrary, they rather rewire the physical presence of the human body towards specific (eco)political purposes to challenge the dominant (mis)conceptions of the landscapes and stir affective responses towards it. At the same time, grounding denotes a practice of situating specific traditions of oppression and violence in the materiality of post-extractive landscapes, which are still regarded in popular imaginaries as marginal and even shameful. These two aspects of grounding are clearly visible in a more recent performative project which was borne in the wake of the Temat: Rzeka exhibition. Mateusz Chaberski Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 20 FIG. 6 Siostry Rzeki [River Sisters], I am the Rawa! , 2024, performance, members of the River Sisters collective entering the Rawa River. In 2024, a performance I am the Rawa! was organised in Katowice by an activist collective called the Siostry Rzeki [River Sisters], led by artists Cecylia Malik and Anna Chmiel during the first edition of Festiwal Rawy which aimed to reconnect the public with the river through engagement in the landscape (Fig. 6). The River Sisters’ engagement was quite intimate. In line with their practice, they collaborated with local activists and walked along the Rawa carrying DIY road signs with over 20 names of Polish rivers, such as the Odra and the Vistula, endangered by the unsustainable environmental politics of the Polish government. At the end of the walk, one by one, they literally walked into the river. Standing in the water, they turned the road signs around to reveal the name of the Rawa. Doing so, each member of the collective recited a similar line: “I am the Vistula but today I am the Rawa.” This simple yet affective embodied gesture clearly alludes to Astrida Neimanis’s hydrofeminist concept “bodies of water”.42 This concept articulates the close entanglement of the human body – 60–70 per cent of which is water – and different watery bodies such as oceans and rivers. In this context, however, the gesture is not merely about expressing solidarity with the Mateusz Chaberski Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 21 damaged river. It grounds the human–water entanglement in specific local, affective and eco-social histories for particular (eco)political purposes. Entering the Rawa aims to confront the performance’s participants with the affective imaginary of this river. In their article Antropocenna Rawa [The Anthropocenic Rawa], Andrzej Kowalczyk, Lucyna Sadzikowska, Marta Tomczok and Paweł Tomczok argue that this imaginary, expressed in the arts and public discourse, has been dominated by two interrelated affects: disgust and shame.43 The source of the former was clearly located in the foul smell given off by the Rawa’s waters, caused by the toxic substances she carried. Echoing Sara Ahmed’s cultural politics of emotions, Kowalczyk et al. point out: “the experience of disgust was not only related to the river’s unwanted closeness but also to a rancid smell reminiscent of a dead body or putrefying corpse”.44 It is no wonder then that at the beginning of the 20thcentury, the stench of the river not only disturbed inhabitants of the Upper Silesian metropolitan area but was also associated with the presence of an actual or imagined disease. In turn, this caused strong affective reactions of shame which took two forms. On the one hand, artists and novelists expressed shame of the damage their forefathers did to the river, often referred to as the disgraced river. On the other hand, the shame was an effect of Upper Silesia inhabitants’ recognition that the pungent river reveals the dark side of their own community, which prompted them to completely abandon the river or bury it underground. As Kowalczyk et al. conclude, burying the Rawa underground was a natural reaction towards these affects. From this perspective, the River Sisters’s physical contact with the heavily polluted, unpleasant water aims to confront the audience with culturally mediated negative affects and to instigate them to bring the river back to the surface, both metaphorically and literally, through re-naturalisation. However, what I am the Rawa! also grounded was a specific local tradition of oppression towards women, which is best illustrated by the performance’s conclusion. Mateusz Chaberski Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 22 FIG. 7 Siostry Rzeki [River Sisters], I am the Rawa! , 2024, Cecylia Malik standing in the river. After all members of the River Sisters had moved out of the river, their leader, Cecylia Malik, went into the water and stood still there for over an hour (Fig. 7). Wearing a blue skirt and a velvet top, she highlights conventional attributes of a woman. Yet she performs this essentialist view of femininity for a clear political purpose. Her defiant posture and steadfast look, echoing Marianne from Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830), becomes a gesture of protest. In this context, however, the protest highlights the specific local knot between environmental destruction and what Silesian anthropologist Grażyna Kubica-Heller refers to as “the Silesian matriarchy”.45 The term is used informally by scholars to denote the dominance of women in Silesian families, specifically among miners and steelworkers. The dominance arose from the unique living conditions of working-class families. Most of the time, the husbands were absent, working long shifts in coal mines and steelworks. As a result, their wives, mothers and grandmothers managed the household and made the most important decisions regarding daily life. However, the Silesian matriarchy was both a blessing and a curse. Women and children bore the brunt of the negative impacts of extractivism, either in the form of domestic violence from their physically and mentally exhausted husbands or they suffered from environmental illnesses and conditions, such as lead poisoning, which often went undiagnosed as an occupational disease of miners. Standing Mateusz Chaberski Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 23 in the Rawa, Malik both grounds the experiences of Silesian women in the actual landscape and re-performs their endurance against the conditions of oppression. As the violence continues in the high incidence of environmental diseases in the region, I am the Rawa! effectively spoils the Anthropo(s)cenic prospect of re-naturalising the river, for it will not be possible without addressing and doing justice to those who have suffered the violent effects of decades of extractivist politics. Conclusion The projects analysed in this article clearly demonstrate that contemporary performative initiatives in the Ruhr and Upper Silesian Coal Basin spoil the dominant practices of greening, which normally transform post-extractive landscapes into green anthroposcenes for humans to enjoy and oversee. Not only do these contemporary initiatives situate their natural-cultural entanglements in the historical and contemporary eco-social injustices, but they also attune to the agency of matter in shaping the landscapes’ pasts, presents and futures. Comparative analysis, however, has indicated that the specificities of these landscapes engender different tactics of spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Whereas performative projects in the Ruhr aim to rewild the neatly re-naturalised waterscapes to unearth social division around the Emscher, interventions in the Rawa ground local traditions of the oppressed in the materiality of the post-extractive waterscapes. The tactics, however, do not posit fixed, readymade futures for these post-extractive landscapes. They rather foster a processual approach that constantly reimagines these futures anew depending on specific relations and tensions between the human and more-than-human inhabitants. Thus, spoiling the Anthropo(s)scene also requires ever-shifting, dynamic methodological approaches that attend to differences in seemingly identical post-extractive landscapes and the performative projects engaging with them. Carefully attending to those differences may be our sole hope for dismantling the Anthropo(s)cene and its master narratives. This research was funded by the National Science Centre, Poland, within the OPUS 28 project Re-Membering Industrial Pasts. Ecology and Labour in Contemporary Polish Performative Arts (project number 2024/55/B/HS2/01836). For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) version arising from this submission. Please cite as follows: Mateusz Chaberski: “Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding.” In: INSERT. Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries, no. 8, Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene, 2025, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17771716. This contribution is licensed under the CC-BY-NC-ND License 4.0 International (Creative Commons, Attribution, Non Commercial, No Derivatives). The reuse of material from other sources may require further authorizations for use by the respective copyright holders. NOTES 1 Cf. Higgins 2021. 2 Colebrook 2023, p. 71. 3 Ibid. Mateusz Chaberski Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 24 4 Ibid., p. 76. 5 Ibid., p. xviii. 6 Tsing 2024, p. 1. 7 Wöbse/Kupper 2021, pp. 1–16. 8 Merwin/Umek/Anastasio 2022. 9 Cf. Chaberski/Kufa 2023, pp. 163–176. 10 Beckett/Keeling 2018. 11 Pollard 1981, p. 46. 12 Hardt/Negri 2001. 13 Chao/Bolender/Kirksey 2022. 14 Vaughn/Guarasci/Moore 2021. 15 Angus 2024, p. 20. 16 Ibid. 17 Haraway 2016. 18 Mentz 2019, p. 5. 19 Cf. Neimanis 2021, p. 8. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., p. 11. 22 Cf. ibid., pp. 25–31. 23 Ibid., p. 43. 24 Povinelli 2021, p. 16. 25 Demos 2023, p. 48. 26 Ibid., pp. 48–49. 27 Berger 2020, p. 296. 28 Ibid. 29 Berger/Golombek 2020, p. 204. 30 Berger/Eickelkamp 2022. 31 Cf. Berger/Golombek 2020, pp. 205–207. 32 Berger/Eickelkamp 2022. 33 Ibid., p. 49. 34 See Fiedler 2021. 35 Ibid. 36 See Fasel 2024, Küpper 2018. 37 Cf. Böhmer/Weber 2016, p. 87. 38 Cohen/Yates 2023, p. 3. 39 The Polish noun for river, rzeka, has a feminine gender, which is often strategically used in feminist academic papers and performative projects that engage with the Rawa. I have chosen to keep that in English (where river is neutral) to reinforce this feminist potentiality. 40 See Malinowska 2019. 41 Szeibel/Zdzienicka-Obałek 2022, p. 12. trans. by Alicja Gorgoń. 42 Neimanis 2017, p. 3. 43 Cf. Kowalczyk/Sadzikowska/Tomczok/Tomczok 2022, p. 44. 44 Ibid., p. 44, trans. by Mateusz Chaberski. 45 Kubica-Heller/Brauntsch 2021, trans. by Mateusz Chaberski. CREDITS Fig. 1: Photo: Anna Uciechowska, CC-BY 3.0. Fig. 2: Courtesy of Klaudyna Schubert and Mateusz Chaberski. © Klaudyna Schubert and Mateusz Chaberski. Fig. 3: Photo: Mateusz Chaberski. Fig. 4: Courtesy of Thorsten Arendt. © Thorsten Arendt. Fig. 5: Courtesy of the artists and Barbara Kubska. © Barbara Kubska. Fig. 6–7: Courtesy of Cecylia Malik and Piotr Dziurdzia. © Piotr Dziurdzia. BIBLIOGRAPHY Siobhan Angus: Camera Geologica. An Elemental History of Photography . Durham, NC/ London: Duke University Press, 2024. 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Vaughn/Bridget Guarasci/Amelia Moore: “Intersectional Ecologies: Reimagining Anthropology and Environment.” In: Annual Review of Anthropology , vol. 50, 2021, pp. 275–290. Anna Tsing: “Attunement: Form in Motion.” In: Australian Journal of Anthropology , vol. 35, no. 1–2, 2024, pp. 78–79. Anna-Katharina Wöbse/Patrick Kupper (eds.): Greening Europe. Environmental Protection in the Long Twentieth Century. A Handbook . Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2021. AUTHOR Mateusz Chaberski is Assistant Professor in the Department for Performativity Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. His research spans performativity; affect and assemblage theories; and Anthropocene studies. He is the author of Doświadczenie (syn)estetyczne. Performatywne aspekty przedstawień site-specific [(Syn)aesthetic Experience: Performative Aspects of Site-Specific Performance] (2015) and Asamblaże, Asamblaże. Doświadczenie w zamglonym antropocenie [Assemblages, Assemblages: Experience in the Foggy Anthropocene] (2019). Together with Mateusz Borowski and Małgorzata Sugiera, he edited Emerging Affinities: Possible Futures of Performative Arts (2019), as well as Situated Knowing: Epistemic Perspectives on Performance with Ewa Bal (2020). He currently leads the research project Re-Membering Industrial Pasts. Ecology and Labour in Contemporary Polish Performative Arts funded by the National Science Centre, Poland.