Mediating ‘alterlife’: Artistic research on plant labour at a contaminated site in Bitterfeld-Wolfen

This article presents a mixed-methods, multi-authored artistic research project that explores the work of plants in more-than-human communities of extreme toxicity at a former brown coal mine turned wastewater pit in Bitterfeld-Wolfen. Considering the political history of the site through a century of intense industrialization, the project asks: what roles do plants assume in the time-marking and place-making processes of ecological labour engaged in toxic remediation? And how can this specific kind of labour be mediated? We use a mixture of qualitative and artistic research methods to draw an analogy between the work of plants and the work of humans who, in different ways, became embroiled in the site’s material history of extraction and industrial expropriation. We use archival photographs montaged with our own photographic field documentation of plant succession and pigments derived from plants collected on site to explore the social, economic and aesthetic dimensions of pollution through the medium of silkscreen – a tightly woven nylon mesh, not unlike the synthetic nylon products historically manufactured on site. We show how shifting meanings of place, labour and multiple urban temporalities coalesce on site – from the deep time of plant ancestors transformed into coal, to the boom and shrink chronology of a manufacturing town in the former German Democratic Republic, to speculations about energy futures, and the ecological possibility of botanical ‘alterlife’.