Presentation short abstract

This paper examines three water initiatives in the Rhenish Mining District through hydrofeminist figurations (monsters, cyborgs, water ghosts). I analyze how these groups challenge technocratic, extractive narratives through multiplying human-water relations and stories in post-mining landscapes.

Presentation long abstract

The Rhenish lignite mining district in Germany is undergoing fundamental transformation. Decades of open-pit mining produced massive hydrorelational interruptions. This paper presents three case studies of initiatives that challenge dominant technocratic water narratives and struggle to multiply water (futures) in post-mining landscapes.

The first examines the River Guardians of the Rhineland Water Plenum countering the normalization of infrastructural disruption. The second analyzes the initiative Save the Gillbach, fighting to preserve a stream whose source today only exists through cooling water. The third explores Walking with Water Ghosts, my curatorial-ethnographic project addressing (post-)mining water bodies as spectral entities that exceed spatiotemporal boundaries.

I propose reading these activities through three feminist figurations: monsters, cyborgs (Haraway 1985, 1991), and water ghosts. Through the monster, Rhineland waters become material-semiotic boundary figures and companions to inhabit damaged hydrorelational environments. The Gillbach emerges as a cyborgian stream, a techno-natural hybrid whose infrastructural dependencies expose ambivalent entanglements of water and energy regimes. Walking with Water Ghosts deploys a hydrofeminist hauntology to reveal spatiotemporal ruptures, linking the future Hambach Lake to water territories in Colombia, criticizing green colonialism while insisting on planetary water justice.

Methodologically, my empirical work draws on Composite Curating, combining curating (Bismarck 2021), collective ethnography (Hetherington 2025), walking-with (Springgay & Truman 2018), and hydrofeminist phenomenology (Neimanis 2017). By engaging with these waters through feminist figurations while walking-with water I want to discuss how such transdiciplinary, curatorial “knowledge exchange events” (Harrison 2015) produce “third stories” (Sørensen/Laser 2021) cultivating attention for troubled waters in the Rhenish district.