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Paper short abstract:

Germany's Ruhr District has exited coal. Yet efforts to build a postcarbon future cannot evade the 'burdens of eternity' that 150 years of excavation leave behind. This paper asks, what might be the existential ramifications of living on hollowed ground?

Paper long abstract:

Memorialising its dense industrial infrastructure as cultural heritage, Germany's Ruhr District is trying to reinvent itself in the name of a green and blue future. A massive image overhaul has accompanied the slow exit from coal and the creation of a restored landscape at once 'wild' and civilized. However, ecological remediation that opens up and repurposes large areas of the former coal industry to the public is a surface phenomenon that remains overshadowed by so-called 'burdens of eternity'. Thousands of kilometres of mining shafts and tunnels and hundreds of thousands of holes in the ground have made the region sink by 25 metres, meaning that rising groundwater levels need to be pumped off in perpetuity. Here, the future is, literally, built on hollowed ground. This paper asks, what might be the existential ramifications of such a life-space? Mobilising a psychoanalytic of the hollow and consociates such as shallowness, depth and solidity, this is an exploration of the physiognomy of hollowed ground as metaphor and lived experience.