Pre-Conference Field Trips (Aug 25)

Located in a national borderlands between lignite mines, Soviet-era uranium extraction, Central Germany's Chemical Triangle and Solar Valley, and emerging sites of lithium prospecting, Dresden is a palimpsest of energy cultures, uniquely triangulating nuclear pasts, fossil presents, and solar futures. A burgeoning silicon economy, political mobilizations for and against ‘green’ energy, post-socialist transformation (fatigue), and minority Sorbian agency all texture the site of Petrocultures 2026—affectively, geologically, socio-technically, historically, and politically.

Linking up with these contexts, we are pleased to offer three pre-conference field trips to sites of energy history and transition in the region on Tuesday, August 25 (the day before the official start of conference).

All field trips will be organized centrally from Dresden on August 25, departing at 8 a.m. and returning at approximately 7 p.m. by chartered bus. The participation fee will be used exclusively to offset transportation costs. The trips are co-funded by TUD and JTC Halle. Each trip will include visits to (former) industrial sites, as well as input from artistic researchers and experts on energy histories and transitions in the region.

The number of participants for each field trip is limited to 25 people each and will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis. Conference participants can register for the field trips via the conference registration platform (register as an attendee, or login to your existing account). TUD members interested in joining one of these field trips: please send us an email at petrocultures2026@tu-dresden.de.

FIELD TRIPS

(1) Betterfield: Complicated Histories and Speculative Futures of Petrochemical Industries

— a guided bus tour, visit to an operating facility, and speculative workshop at the Chemical Park Bitterfeld-Wolfen

The chemical complexes of Bitterfeld and Wolfen, founded in the 1890s, were the site of major innovations in the fields of chlorine- and photochemistry, as well as artificial fibres. From the beginnings in the ninenteenth century until the end of the GDR, their chemical processing relied on local lignite, extracted from the vast open pit mines nearby. Underneath the chemical park and its surrounding municipalities, the ground holds extensive multi-contaminations—a condition internationally known as the “Bitterfeld syndrome.” In the 2000s, Bitterfeld saw the spectacular rise of the pioneering German photovoltaic industry and the so-called 'Solar Valley‘, which by the 2010s had already been overtaken by the Chinese PV industry. Today, all the remaining classical chemical industrial producers in the region are under severe pressure to transition to sustainable production paths, mainly due to exploding energy and production costs and the heavy competition on the world market. The dictum is: Transition or die. But chemical transition is not only technical and economic. In the midst of today's overlapping crises, it remains unclear what “transition” even means or what the parameters of a “better,” economically and ecologically sustainable chemistry are. Speculative methods are one way to open this question: not by proposing an answer, but by constructing a future vantage point from which the present looks different. This excursion stages such a future in situ, in Bitterfeld-Wolfen: a guided bus tour to encounter it, a workshop to inhabit and negotiate it from within.
The bus tour itself is real—a route through Chemiepark Bitterfeld-Wolfen and its surroundings, including a visit to an operating facility. The narration, however, comes from a possible future. Industrial sites become elements of a scenario not yet realised; a restaurant or sports field becomes the setting for stories about everyday life after transition. The tour will be followed by a speculative design workshop to collectively explore what “a better future” could mean in this context, and who gets to define it.

Start: Dresden, 8:00 am
End: Dresden, 7:00 pm
Lunch on site has to be paid separately, afternoon coffee and snacks included.

External Organizers:
Alexander Klose (Just Transition Center, University of Halle), 
Benjamin Steininger (Max-Planck-Institute of Geoanthropology), 

Speculative Design Concept and Workshop:
N O R M A L S, Berlin
Bernd Hopfengärtner, Régis Lemberthe, Cedric Flazinski
https://normalfutu.re/

This field trip is co-funded by the Just Transition Center at the University of Halle.

(2) Legacies of Soviet Uranium Mining in the Saxonian Ore Mountains

— a guided field trip to sites of former uranium mining and ongoing remediation in Ronneburg

On this field trip, we will visit the nearby town of Ronneburg in the Saxonian Ore Mountains together with artist-researcher Grit Ruhland, whose work examines the history of Soviet uranium mining and its enduring afterlives in the region. Ronneburg was one of the principal sites of the former mining company Wismut, which, during the Soviet occupation, extracted uranium for the Soviet nuclear industry until its closure in 1990. The scale of this extraction remains little known: the GDR was once the world’s fourth-largest producer of uranium, after the USSR, the United States, and Canada. Its environmental, economic, and social legacies continue to shape the region today. Guided by Grit, we will visit former mining and remediation sites, trace the history of Ronneburg in relation to the nuclear age, discuss ongoing ecological and political challenges, and reflect on what it means to live with the long-term presence of radiation.

Start 8AM Dresden
End 7PM Dresden
Lunch in Ronneburg has to be paid separately 

Organizer: Michaela Büsse (TUD)
This field trip is co-funded by TUD Dresden University of Technology

(3) Situating Coal, Transformation, Cultural Memory, and Sorbian Futures in Lusatia

— a guided tour to sites of open-pit coal mining, transformation, revitalization, and cultural memory in Lusatia

Join us on a guided field trip through Lusatia, a cultural landscape irreversibly marked by more than a century of lignite mining and its entanglement with Europe’s fossil industries, post-socialist transformation, Germany’s energy transition, and the displacement and marginalization of Sorbian minority culture. Once the world’s largest site of opencast coal mining, the region has become emblematic of the complex realities of socio-ecological transformation, where ongoing lignite extraction coexists with projects of ecological renaturation, cultural revitalization, and transition toward sustainable economies. Traveling between an open-pit lake, the active Welzow-Süd mine, the decommissioned F60 conveyor bridge (the world’s largest industrial extraction machine), and the folklore-rich Krabat Mill, we will explore the ambivalences of contemporary life in the shadow of extractivism from a Sorbian perspective, foregrounding how cultural survival has often required becoming entangled with the very infrastructures that transform one’s homeland.

The field trip will be accompanied by Karoline Schneider, an artistic researcher and member of the Lusatia-based Sorbian collective Kolektiw Wakuum, whose work connects Sorbian cultural memory with feminist methodologies and critical theories of embodied ecologies and minoritarian futurisms. Situating energy production and transition within their specific material and affective environments, the program includes the performance ryč / rěč [speak/dig] at Šiboj Lake, which challenges narratives of renaturation by digging into submerged family histories and reclaiming lost languages, as well as a guided tour of the CircEcon research campus dedicated to sustainability transformation at the site of the former Schwarze Pumpe power plant. The field trip thus opens a space to reflect on energy transition as a deeply cultural process shaped by questions of memory, loss, repair, and minority futures.

Organizer: Petrocultures 2026 Team (TUD) and Karoline Schneider (Kolektiw Wakuum)
This field trip is co-funded by TUD Dresden University of Technology