Ghost Lakes:
When Aquifers Fill Pipes and Rivers Become Lakes

Peringsmaar & Hambach Mine
21 September 2025

The first walk engaged with artificial lakes, aquifer water, and future hydrological imaginaries. At the Peringsmaar, participants encountered a lake framed as successful recultivation and sustained by deep groundwater mobilized from the Hambach mine. Microscopic plankton studies revealed multispecies worlds thriving within water whose geological residence time has been radically accelerated through extraction.

These encounters brought ecological vitality into relation with histories of vanished forests, erased source zones, and displaced hydrological relations. The walk articulated a third story in which liveliness and loss coexist without resolution.

At the edge of the Hambach mine, near the planned Rhine water pipeline, the walk confronted water’s constitutive absence. Walking-with exercises shifted attention toward bodily disorientation, infrastructural rhythms, and temporal distortion. A performative figuration of a broken water nymph articulated the mine as a haunted threshold where river, lake, and void blur into an unstable future dependent on continuous infrastructural maintenance.

Riikka Tauriainen
Riikka Tauriainen’s activation worked with microscopy and embodied immersion to extend perception beyond the human scale. By collecting plankton samples while wading into the Peringsmaar, participants encountered multispecies life sustained by aquifer water that has been violently displaced and accelerated through mining infrastructures. The microscopic organisms made palpable the collision of deep-time hydrological processes with industrial circulation, revealing the lake as a site where ecological vitality and hydrological violence coexist without resolution.

Vivian Hernandez

Vivian Hernandez developed walking-with exercises using a zine of simple perceptual prompts that redirected attention away from the visual spectacle of the Hambach mine toward bodily sensation, fatigue, disorientation, and infrastructural sound. By asking participants to notice how their bodies responded to pipes, pumps, and voids, the activation rendered temporality “out of joint” and transformed the mine into an affective space where extraction, future planning, and embodied unease intersect.

Zora Ritz

Zora Ritz concluded the walk with a performative figuration of a broken water nymph. This monstrous, non-nostalgic figure gave voice to waters forced into states of transition—neither river nor lake, neither natural nor artificial. Through storytelling and individualized prompts, the performance articulated the Hambach mine as a haunted threshold, where destroyed waters, violently repurposed flows, and uncertain futures remain bound to ongoing infrastructural maintenance.

Snack
Marie Donike

Ghost Streams:
When Power Plants Turn into Springs

Gillbach, Niederaußem & Hambach
12 October 2025

The second walk followed the Gillbach, a stream that persists as an infrastructural afterlife. Once spring-fed, it now flows through warm cooling water discharged from a coal-fired power plant, carrying ancient groundwater into industrial circulation. Through narrative prompts, sound poetry, collective singing, and ritual practices, the walk rendered the Gillbach perceptible as a composite water ghost: groundwater, cooling discharge, ecological habitat, and political conflict unfolding simultaneously. Participants encountered the stream as intimate and monstrous, inviting care while embodying infrastructural dependency. The walk culminated in a performative ritual at the mine’s edge, creating a moment of care time: a suspension of solution-oriented futurity in favor of shared mourning, ethical attention, and responsibility toward damaged waterscapes.

Maud van den Beuken &
Sophia Bardoutsou

At the artificial source of the Gillbach, Maud van den Beuken and Sophia Bardoutsou led a collective sound practice inside a tunnel where cooling water emerges from the power plant. By singing with the rushing stream, participants became resonant bodies amplifying the river’s already existing voice. The activation made the infrastructural containment of the stream acoustically tangible while producing an intimate, embodied relation to an otherwise technocratically managed water body. 

.DENCUENTRO

The walk concluded with a performative ritual by the collective .DENCUENTRO at the edge of the Hambach mine. Beginning from experiences of ecological grief and insufficiency, the performers guided a procession and altar practice using objects collected from the Gillbach. This gesture enacted “care time”: a suspension of solution-oriented futurity in favour of collective mourning, ethical attention, and responsibility toward damaged and haunted waterscapes. 

Snack Marie Donike