The new performance by choreographer Sergiu Matis consists of texts by authors from all over the world who describe their personal experiences with our existentially threatened environment. These reflections, commissioned for ›Earth Works‹, are recited, translated and interpreted by five performers.

Familiar landscapes have turned into question marks. Trees have been felled, entire forests have been cleared. And now? What happens that nothing grows anymore? A question that arises in many places around the world. The project ›Pembalakan‹ by documentary filmmaker and theater director Daniel Kötter is an adaption of his theater piece ›Roden‹ and undertakes a topography of this loss.

The video performance ›POOLS‹ portrays three mining areas used for tourism. The open pit mine in Hambach , the Dead Sea and the Lusatian lignite mining area are the protagonists of this work. Marlene Helling tells of her encounters with these places through travel reports and a movement repertoire inspired by them.

Following a walk through the slag heap, this workshop/lecture examines the ongoing extractive logics in present day Philippines. Where feudal configurations from the Spanish and American colonial period still survive today, through landlordism, haciendas, and monoculture plantations. This speculation on ‘othered’ ecologies is told through a few common food items found in local markets, that were the main trade items during the height of imperial extraction from the Philippines.

For ›Shifting Grounds‹, artist Mascha Fehse, a frequent guest at PACT, is designing ›Recreational Successions‹ – a spatial installation made of modular elements that will serve as a temporary meeting point and provide a source of shade and shelter for the audience. 

Today, the Ruhr region no longer stands for traditional heavy industry, but for change. Smoking collieries, coking plants and blast furnaces have largely disappeared, and thousands of hectares of industrial wasteland have been created in their wake. Humans have changed these landscapes in a profound, lasting manner. The terrain is often devoid of any natural soil, and characterised instead by waste rock, rubble or railway ballast.