Stories of Post-extractive Feminist Futures

The spatial practices of mining areas have been under-researched using inclusive methods. The shrinking town of Eisenerz lies at the foot of the Erzberg mountain, Austria’s largest and best-known site of iron ore extraction. The post-industrial town is experiencing a rural exodus, which disproportionately affects women. Mining is predominantly talked about in heroic narratives, while counter-narratives of repair, care, reproduction and maintenance are mostly omitted.

Within this complex field, the project focuses on intersectional feminist perspectives to collect post-extractive stories, which will broaden the perception of mining areas and strengthen the focus on the diversity of narratives for future perspectives. We ask this: Which practices contribute to the continuance of the community? Through this question, the project aims to show and discuss the multiple and diverse actors and their spatial practices of repair, maintenance and care.

Through feminist strategies of making visible, bringing together, and anticipating and activating futures, and also with the help of the artistic tools of knowledge production, we will show how constant reparative counter-practices are performed amid extraction. An ethical, intersectional framework of feminist citizen science will revive the margins of how we know about exploitation. The aim is to deliver a complex, yet profound, image of a polyphonic Anthropocene that allows dynamic assemblages to be imagined after exploitation.