Romani snapshot photography and a black sense of place: appraising infrastructure through movement, memory, and metabolism

Abstract

The concept of a black sense of place focuses on racialised infrastructural violence and black struggle in the production of space in the Americas. Addressing how this resonates with the histories of dispossession of Roma in postsocialist Europe, this article examines how a black sense of place is constituted, which it explores through Czech Romani women’s encounters with/in a postmilitary landscape. Former military areas are underexamined refuges of biocultural diversity and infrastructural de- and re-composition. Reworking participatory photography as a compositional process of snapshot photography that draws together ‘snaps’ of images, thought, and affect that do not congeal into a narrative, the analysis focuses on the modalities of movement, memory, and metabolism for collectively sensing and (re)imagining an infrastructural landscape. The concept of geocorporeality helps to specify how infrastructure bodies and knowledges co-compose with the geos, where a black sense of place materialises as metabolic ingestion, a refusal to forget or to stay in one’s place in ways that inspire the infrastructural imagination in an ostensible wasteland.

Keywords:

• Black sense of place
• geocorporeality
• infrastructure
• participatory photography
• postmilitary landscape
• Romani women

Introduction

Examining the co-constitution of bodies and postmilitary land in postsocialist Europe through the method of participatory photography, this article contributes to analyses of a black sense of place (McKittrick 2011). In geography, a sense of place broadly refers to the factors that establish a location’s distinctive character and to the ways in which humans inhabit and experience particular places. Underscoring the idea that places are ‘constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus’ (Massey 2001, 154), feminist geographers have drawn attention to the ‘power geometries’ of particular time-space constellations. Doreen Massey offers an expanded conceptualisation of a sense of place as ontologically multiple, in flux, and constitutively interconnected with the wider world.

Informed by the history of transatlantic slavery and the plantation economies in the Americas, a black sense of place elucidates how ‘black human geographies are implicated in the production of space […] always, and in all sorts of ways’ (McKittrick and Wood 2007, 4). According to McKittrick (2011, 947), the concept focuses analytically on the spatial contours of ‘racial violences (concrete and epistemic actions and structural patterns intended to harm, kill, or coerce a particular grouping of people)’, the concomitant construction of ‘black placelessness’ (948), and the ‘historical and contemporary struggles against practices of domination’ (949) through grassroots organising that ‘denaturalizes’ (958) racial violence. As McKittrick argues in reference to the violence of destroying urban places and the rural expansion of prisons, infrastructures are constitutively implicated in a black sense of place insofar as blackness ‘is deeply connected to sites of environmental, social and infrastructural decay’ (951) and attendant dispossession and slow or premature death. Yet, focusing on infrastructural violence risks an assumption about what an infrastructure is and does, and sutures blackness to brokenness such that ‘[t]his analytical logic can only “end” with black death which, interestingly, reifies the very colonial structures that research on racial violence is (seemingly) working against’ (953). Such a focus notably obfuscates the modalities through which places and infrastructures are collaboratively known and (re)imagined.

This article examines the modalities of encounters of Czech Romani women with infrastructural remnants in a postmilitary area against the backdrop of scholarship that brings together Romani studies, critical theories of race, and postcolonial and decolonial studies (Trehan and Kóczé 2009; Kóczé 2018), and considers the resonances in the histories of the persecution, dislocation, and dehumanisation of Roma and African Americans on account of their real or imagined transnational origins (Chang and Rucker-Chang 2020). In contrast to the work of feminist geographers interested in the spatial constitution of (post)colonial power relations (Blunt and Rose 1994), this inquiry did not start out with a focus on race. The 250-square-kilometre expanse of forests, savannah, sandstone formations, and disconnected villages in northern Bohemia (‘Orlík’) that the paper focuses on is marked not by urban decay but by military activity under state-socialism. I went to this region to research the solar energy installations that had been built there. My encounters with local Romani women, however, made a sense of the racialisation of this infrastructural landscape insistent, if hard to substantiate. Postmilitary places, as I will show here, are underexamined sites for exploring the interrelations of ‘place-life and place-death’ (McKittrick 2011, 954) and infrastructural de- and re-composition, especially perhaps when they are located in the ‘multiply colonized space’ (Trehan and Kóczé 2009, 50) of postsocialist Europe, that continues to be seen as Europe’s ‘other’ (Koobak, Tlostanova, and Thapar-Björkert 2021). Geographers have noted that while these postmilitary sites still bear the scars of the military activity, they also unexpectedly created new habitats, which provide sanctuary to flora and fauna that has been eradicated by commercial agriculture and industry – rendering military training areas even richer in species diversity than dedicated nature reserves (Davis 2007; Marhoul and Zámeční 2012).

Less scrutinised is the fact that postmilitary areas have also become a refuge for peoples and infrastructure that are unwelcome elsewhere. The scattered settlements of the Orlík region include two that the government terms ‘socially excluded localities’, which have a high level of unemployment, lack public services and are considered Roma ghettos. In an effort to contextualise the solar energy plantations, I wanted to understand what bodies and infrastructures were gestating on this land, and what violences and opportunities for (re)imagining infrastructural arrangements this place might create. Amongst the Orlík residents we spoke with, middle-aged Romani women appeared particularly interested in adopting participatory ­photography to explore this postmilitary land, a method said to ‘convey something of the feel’ (Rose 2016, 308) of a place or a landscape. In contrast to ethnographic studies that often confine the knowledges and experiences of racialised others to ‘their’ places – the slum, the ghetto, the harem (Blunt and Rose 1994) – and thereby risk replicating society’s exclusions, the article examines the women’s spatio-corporeal orientations within the wider postmilitary landscape through photographic encounters that turned attention to how bodies have been affected by and themselves affect this land.

I propose the notion of geocorporeality to capture the pathways involved in the mutual implication of bodies and infrastructure. Inspired by Kathryn Yusoff’s (2013) work on geological life that highlights the effects of minerals in and on human bodies, geocorporeality broadly refers to the dynamic interrelations of the geologic (earthly minerals, metals, fossils) and sensuous bodily materiality or the corporeal. In so doing, this neologism foregrounds how corporeality is shaped by ‘inhuman forces’ (2013, 779) and how infrastructure is lively and affective. Methodologically, the paper experiments with participatory photography, which over the past two decades has become a critical tool for examining everyday spatial practices and orderings (Rose 2016; Davis et al. 2020; McIntyre 2003). Taking my lead from the participants, I reworked the tenets of photovoice into a practice that I term ‘snapshot photography’ in order to capture the affordances of the ‘snap’ element of a quick shot, a sudden idea or sensation. The article is organised as follows: after introducing the method of snapshot photography, I examine in turn the kinaesthetic, mnemonic, and metabolic modalities through which infrastructural arrangements are registered and responded to. The conclusion discusses the implications of these sensual orientations for a black sense of place.

The method of snapshot photography

Participatory photography is a felicitous method for exploring a black sense of place because of its emphasis on creative, collective, and sensory ways of knowing where visual perception is entangled with other sensory registers. While not unitary in its approach, Wang and Burris’ (1997) method of photovoice has been particularly influential. Building on critical pedagogy, photovoice aims to enable participants, often members of marginalised groups, to take photographs that tell their story in the language of images, identify community concerns, and facilitate change through transversal discussions and photo exhibitions. Yet, in addition to practitioners’ concerns about silences and the inadvertent perpetuation of stereotypes of poverty and dysfunction (Milne and Muir 2020; Lykes 2010), there remains a tension between the proposition that photographs can capture what cannot be put into words – ‘If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug a camera’ (Wang and Burris 1997, 372) – and the emphasis on ‘voicing our individual and collective experience’ (381), or VOICE that often appears self-present and self-evident. As Wang and Burris characterise the relationship between the verbal and the visual, ‘[p]hotography provides the medium through which people’s visions and voices may surface’ (382). This puts the analytical focus on the photographer’s narration, with relatively little concern for what remains withdrawn or excessive in verbal and visual snapshots.

In my research I develop the more open and iterative approach of snapshot photography that attends to image aesthetics (Shankar 2016), silences as much as ‘polyvocal composite’ accounts (Lykes 2010). Through local advertisements and the personal contacts of a Roma community organiser, nine women came to pick up single-use cameras and explore their involvement with Orlík in ways that they wanted to pass on to others in the form of a photo exhibition. All except for one were Romani, and between the ages of 35 and 65. Most were unemployed or underemployed, and widowed or divorced, living alone or with a partner, a friend, and, in two cases, (grand)children, so they had both an interest in taking photographs and the time available to do so. What the community organiser liked about photography was that it provided an opportunity to bring visibility to the creative potential of Romani women but did not require skills like drawing or storytelling. This cautions against naturalising storytelling and voice. In interviews published by a local women’s group, participants later reflected on their withdrawnness as conditioned by depression and debt. Collaboration with a German university researcher and Czech gender studies graduate students constituted an opportunity for the women to produce snapshots in a process where the different generational positions of the students, as well as my migrant status, limited Czech language skills, and interest in infrastructural arrangements, appeared to facilitate working together across difference, positionings that, as Wang and Burris (1997) make clear, included the participants’ power to engage with some snapshots and not others, and my power to revisit some of these encounters here.

Following the invitation to record their experiences of the region to inspire others, the women used disposable analogue cameras that I had purchased because of their affordability. Over the course of nine months, they produced nearly 500 images, most of which were devoid of any humans. While these cameras did not offer any configuration options, they preserved ostensible mishaps, which became an inspiration for retraining our modes of attention. Over the nine months the participating women met in seven four-hour photo workshops that we held at the home of one woman and had permission to tape-record. The workshops were organised around the collective viewing of photographs and invited spontaneous responses and queries, and later also the selection of snapshots for an exhibition that we presented in a larger Czech town, in Prague, and at the Museum of Romani Cultures in Brno. For each meeting the students and I pre-selected between 25 and 75 images that we deemed visually interesting or conversely obscure and initially grouped into six thematic categories (‘nature’, ‘infrastructure’, ‘monuments’, ‘ruins’, ‘home’, and ‘community’). While this ordering gave the viewing a certain rhythm, the categories had little epistemic value, since infrastructure, for example, could be seen as ruins, community, or nature. The workshops were typically divided into an introductory discussion of possible exhibition venues and tentative juxtapositions of images and text based on previous sessions; the projection of and responses to digitalised photo images; and an open-ended discussion of emerging themes such as the women’s memories of the Russian occupation. They concluded with what kinds of photographs the women who wanted to extend their inquiry still planned to take.

This process diverged from the procedure of photovoice in three ways. First, as a novice to the region and its communities, I did not specify a photographic focus or theme. As the facilitator of the first workshop, research student Rad Bandit, addressed the women, ‘You know most about this region, you, your eyes convey some mode/mood [Czech zpusob] through this photo … that can inspire people who have never been here!’ (Workshop [WS]1). For me, these words implied that the area of Orlík was infused with sensations: multiple modes and moods that could be relationally picked up in the women’s snapshot photography.

Second, we did not restrict the collective viewing to what the women considered their best shots. Rather, we learned to pay attention to the snapshots’ aesthetics and the accidental traces that could be seen in the images that did not turn out ‘right’. This made for a slower, more iterative process, where we presented snapshots that had not initially been selected for discussion. Third, assuming the role of active listeners, we did not press the women with questions about what the photographs meant or how particular issues could be resolved. This is in contrast to Wang and Burris’ SHOWeD technique, which assumes there is a meaning behind every image and risks putting participants on the spot if they cannot articulate it. Not all photographs generated commentary or queries. Where they did, the comments were often limited to aesthetic responses such as ‘krásný’ (beautiful), ‘hrozný’ (terrible), or ‘nadherný’ (wonderful), or referred to the circumstances – the where, when and with whom – in which the images were taken. By not articulating representational meaning, the women encouraged a perception of the image that went beyond visual representation (Balayannis 2019) and attended to affective responses that provided new connections.

This approach impacted the process of analysis and how it is presented here. In the sections that follow I show how, in the absence of a photographic referent or story, we can start aesthetically by tracing the lines of the women’s paths through Orlík’s expanse, zooming in on ‘the imposition of one kind of line on another’ (Ingold 2007, 2), their surfaces and cracks to explore how infrastructural arrangements geocorporeally affected the photographers’ movement, memory, and metabolism in ways that undergird a black sense of place. Here I attuned to absences and silences as much as situated polyvocality woven out of the snapshots of memory and sensations that were not necessarily tethered to a particular image. In this kind of compositional process, the geographic location of the photographed event as much as the taste of local forest fruits that we ate during the workshops were an invitation to engage in an embodied experiment, where each of us was sensationally, imaginatively, and sometimes metabolically transported into places and their relational contexts. Rather than being organised around narrative themes, each section focuses on a modality of appraising infrastructural arrangements: movement, memory, and metabolism. Together they aim to create both an argument and a feeling (Rose 2016) that makes palpable a black sense of place through Romani snapshot photography.

Movement

The political aesthetics of infrastructure

Two of the women used their first roll of film on Orlík’s roads. Staňa’s (pseudonym) practice of snapping photos while driving along the region’s only thoroughfare was not so much an act of her travelling across a terrain, but more a form of ‘wayfaring’ (Ingold 2007), of making her way through a varied landscape, sometimes stopping, and sometimes speeding up to move towards Orlík’s largest settlement where she lived (Figure 1). Staňa’s description of her photography as an experimental and sensuous experience (‘everywhere there was forest, on either side, I enjoyed it so much!’ (WS 2)) suggests that these snapshots were affective and not prompted by a predetermined referent. In the ‘moving still’ in Figure 1, the vanishing line of the metal water pipes combined with the road and the windshield wiper framing the shot and Staňa’s movement and animated a sensory response of the women:

Figure 1. Staňa, Untitled.

Barbora: They’re horrible, right?

Staňa: Well, what can you do?

Antonie: But girls, you can be glad they’re not painted red! (chuckles)

Staňa: The green goes with the green.

Barbora: There should be a five-pointed star there, shouldn’t there? (chuckles)

Sofie (loudly): We have a heating plant here, and the most expensive heating and water in the whole republic! That company that delivers heating to the panel houses [Czech paneláky] – they have these crazy surcharges in the housing estates. They have to pay 20,000 [crowns] for water there, 25,000 for heating. (WS2)

In this photographic encounter, the above-ground water pipes incidentally captured in the image register aesthetically and politically: as an eyesore that conjures up the communist past as much as it does the capitalist ­present, in which a privatised utility company is observed to be overcharging the people who have moved into the former military buildings, many of whom are Roma. Larkin (2013) speaks of the poetics of infrastructure when focusing on infrastructure’s material form, which often embodies political aspirations and is appraised aesthetically as a form of cognition achieved through the senses. The women’s remarks and the outraged tone in Sofie’s voice signal dis-sent, a difference in sentiment from people who do not notice the pipes. These pipes, which insistently wound their way through Staňa’s snapshots, were appraised through the women’s movement, sight, and memory as a structure that in its provision of a basic necessity actually produced economic marginalisation and racial inequality. The polyvocal snapshot thus registers the women’s refusal to forget or ignore the infrastructural arrangements that harm Romani lives.

Yet, in the workshop where this shot was discussed, there was silence about how the privatisation of water and heating was affecting life in Orlík’s housing estates – although I learned later that two of the photographers had incurred a debilitating debt to the energy company. I hear this silence as a refusal to reinforce racialised stereotypes associated with energy debt that portray the ghetto as ‘a space of violence, deviance, and void’ (Wacquant 2009, 115). In considering Orlík ‘a landscape of contrasts where sensitive and soft people do not survive’ (iDNES.cz, 13.12.2016), media reports painted a picture of Orlík as a place that numbs the aesthetic senses, rather than stoking its residents’ critical sensibilities, which we can discern in the snapshot above. In the absence of a story line, we can follow the lines of the road and the women’s movements along other paths. Larisa started her photographic excursion on a former military road that like many others is now closed to regular road traffic (Figure 2). Lined with the ruins of houses, this path reveals a different infrastructural ­geography, that of an infrastructure undone by weedy grasses which cut into the vanishing line of an abandoned road. Larisa’s accidental reflection in the car window reminds us that the photographer is a constitutive part of the photographed scene. While one of the participants later felt that the unintentional inclusion of the car in the image made these snapshots seem superficial or careless, these ostensible flaws are tangible evidence of the situated interrelation between the configurations of the camera, the body of the photographer, affect, the chance aspect of the snapshot, and light differentially reflected off the objects and refracted into the chemistry of the film. They suggest that the road, car, and camera are not the technical backdrops to a scene but that they actively participate in the kinaesthetic sensation of moving through Orlík: the subtle energies and bodily reverberations of driving across cracks and potholes, the rush of the wind through a half-open window animated the improvisational practice of shooting pictures while driving that signal that these women do not stay in ‘their’ place.

Figure 2. Larisa, Untitled.

Infrastructural atmosphere

In a kind of visual echo, the image of pipes arching across the road captured in Staňa’s car mirror (Figure 4) reappeared in a shot taken a few months later by Sofie as she walked underneath them (Figure 3). We can regard such photographic returns as ‘coming back to persistent troublings’ (Hughes and Lury 2013, 787), ‘turnings over’ that de- and re-contextualise the pipes so that they oscillate between being a focal point or monument and part of an all-encompassing atmosphere.

Figure 3. Sofie, Gateway to Russia.

Figure 4. Staňa, Untitled.

Sofie: As I went to work, I took pictures from both sides […] It’s the most expensive water. […] But what can you say about the photo like when someone comes and sees that pipe?

Tereza (workshop facilitator): Every day you walk underneath the pipes. It’s like they’re some kind of gate.

Antonie: It’s a very unfortunate set-up. Especially when you’re driving along the road and have the pipes alongside you, it feels like somewhere in an industrial zone, like somewhere in Litvínov. (laughs)

Jelena: I’d call it ‘Gateway to Russia’.

Tereza: It leads to…

Sofie: … the remains [Czech: torza] of housing blocks, many different buildings and ruins. (WS3)

As they press Orlík’s inhabitants to move around, underneath, and alongside them, the water pipes reveal their geocorporeal force to stir the women’s sensoria and memory. The spontaneous captioning of the snapshot in Figure 3 as the Gateway to Russia suggests that the pipe arch – an obligatory passage point for water and residents at the entrance of the former military base – constitutes an inadvertent monument (from Latin monere ‘to remind, tell (of), and make think of’), a material reminder of unequal provisioning and of the Russian occupation.

The seemingly incongruous reference to the pipes of Litvínov, a coal-mining town with a large petrochemical plant – and another Roma enclave where ‘the landscape is crossed by lines of metal pipes, some rusty and broken, others still in use’ (Cusack 2015, 42) – seems to prefigure the evocation of Orlík’s uranium leachate pipes that we will turn to later. Antonie’s ironic laughter at the thought of the industrial pipes is a force that touches, as humour often does, something troubling and uncanny as her remarks shift the water pipes into the discordant context of chemical pollution. The ubiquitous pipes and the laughter create a distinctive atmosphere of the kind that Stewart (2011) described as ‘a force field in which people find themselves, … an expressivity, the sense of potentiality and event’ (452) to be both physical and psychic, a sensual landscape of geocorporeal composition.

Together the snapshots taken on the road alert us to the significance that movement holds for living in a place with blocked roads and lack of services, and to the sensory modality through which the political aesthetics of infrastructure register. Movement is a thinking-feeling through inhuman forces, the hard surfaces of roads, the extensive demarcations of the pipes, and the presence of invisible flows that enable and undermine Romani lives and are rendered tangible through photographic encounters. Importantly, this kinaesthetic stirring that informs a black sense of place revisits persistent troubles without reducing the multiplicity of the heating infrastructure to a singular object or approach. Infrastructural arrangements form an atmosphere as well as a monument, a material reminder of what is not forgotten.

It is to the role of memory that the Roma are often denied (Stewart 2004) and to its significance for (re)imagining infrastructure in a black sense of place that I shall turn next.

Memory

Infrastructural decompostion

When before taking photographs the women thought about the places important to them, several of them spontaneously recalled the structures and sites that the state and army had destroyed. Orlík’s postmilitary landscape, they implied, was a site of decomposition and re-composition, of forgetting and remembering – which includes remembrance of what is absent in the present, the not forgotten. Consider the recollections of Eva and Jelena, who grew up in a nearby town after their families immigrated to Orlík from Slovakia after the post-war expulsion of Orlík’s Sudeten Germans.

Eva: It hurts me that they destroyed our castle where we’ve played as kids and where I dated as a fourteen-year-old girl […] The [castle] park is very important to me, the different paths. I still wander along these paths but it’s a bit different now, I’m no longer young. And those memories are there.

Barbora: The tracks by the Soviet troops are still here too.

Jelena: When the Russians were here, I went to the forest for [picking] blueberries, and the convoys came straight through the forest, tanks, soldiers with rifles, I experienced it all! And our forests were devasted. Oh, there were holes everywhere, felled trees, I saw everything! There never used to be a settlement, the Russians built it all. There was a gatehouse and soldiers, and you couldn’t enter. The Soviets had shops of their own, kindergartens, schools, everything. And when we didn’t have any bread on Sunday, we went there, and they opened the gate and let us through […] But we were under occupation, and when the Russian women came to shop, we had to move to the side, and they did their shopping first. (WS1)

The women’s wanderings through the park without its castle and the continued practice of collecting berries suggest that walking activates memory. Geocorporeally, this memory is distributed not only cognitively but is also in their muscles and material environs, and thus contributes to the creation of a sense of place. Emphasising the importance of kinaesthetic memory, Mortimer Sandilands (2008) has written that ‘[m]emory ties together bodies and landscapes in ways that reveal the inextricable connections between physicality and reflection’ (271). Hence the importance of wandering through places of annihilation, which halts the forgetting that the state-orchestrated demolitions appeared to promote. Suggesting that infrastructure is, or can be, an unequal ‘meeting place’ (Massey 2001), Jelena’s recollection of the army base suggests that postsocialist infrastructural memory is not simply nostalgia. For this photographer, foraging along former military tracks keeps alive the memory of dispossession and inequality. This complicates ‘the feeling of being chez soi, at home [and] at ease’ (Casey 2000, 191) that philosophers say arises when we inhabit familiar places and form place memory. Importantly, the sensory ‘memory images’ (Bergson 2005) that inform a black sense of place rest on the capacity to see what is not there as much as what is, including the ability to ‘unsee’ or decompose in reverse a structure that exists in the present by recalling how it came into being, and what it extinguished. The act of picking up a camera, often for the first time, prompted the women to wander anew through sites of infrastructural decomposition. While this activity sensorially activated mnemonic snapshots of interactions with the Russians, the spatial proximity of ruination and of still functional structures like the water pipes (Figures 3 and 4) re-turned the women’s memory to the present. Here the sensory memory of what had been seemed to incite reflections on infrastructural intersections and alternative compositions. Thus, Staňa, who recently returned to Orlík after more than two decades in the UK, began to question the dereliction of the former ‘Russian school’.

Figure 5. Jelena, Orlík’s Pripyat.

Staňa: Aren’t they able to repair this so there could be a school? At least for the younger children, because the women have to take them to school in U. and then wait there for hours for the bus to take them back. Terrible.

Antonie: They don’t want a school here! [U. representative] says it would be segregation, that there would only be Roma.

Staňa: Such a beautiful school! Beautiful. And there aren’t just Roma; there are Ukrainians, Mongolians, Czechs as well. (WS2)

The women’s encounters with infrastructural ruins, then, did not lead them just to recall the Russian occupation that was rarely talked about anymore. By connecting the absence of a working school in Orlík’s largest locality with the scarcity of buses, which ran only in the morning and the afternoon, Staňa underscored in passing how racialised immobility was infrastructurally produced or choreographed in ways that confined many young Romani women to long periods of inactivity and a life slowed down. The actualisation of sense-memories of the former school had the effect of rendering the ruins a ‘mnemonic of collective possibility’ (Amin 2014, 147) of what these remainders might yet become – even, and perhaps especially, when (re)building the school was impeded, ostensibly in the service of racial equality.

Philosophers of memory have noted the entanglement of memory that is ‘directed towards prior reality’ (Ricoeur 2006, 6) and imagination that points towards ‘the unreal, the possible, the utopian, and the other’ (ibid.). Both could entail what Bergson (2005), for memory, considered the actualisation of the virtual. In reference to (counter)cultural performances, José Muñoz (2009) has argued that, animated by queer desire, utopian traces of queer possibility ‘can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future… beyond the quagmire of the present’ (1). In the Romani snapshot photography, utopian traces of communal education, animated by a desire for Roma lives to flourish and by the past practices of the Russians, may be found in decomposed infrastructure.

Two of the photographers began to engage in local activism to rebuild the school, and the photo workshops became occasions to update us on their efforts. In lively re-enactments, performed in direct speech and punctuated by slaps on the table, the women described townhall meetings, the municipality’s attempts to sell the school to a private investor, and the unexpected cross-ethnic solidarities that formed in rallying for its (re)construction. As part of a black sense of place made tangible through snapshot photography, infrastructural ruins remain geocorporeally forceful: they incite sensory memories that can have ‘world-making capacities’ (Jensen and Morita 2017) even after the structure’s demise.

More-than-human solidarities

Images of infrastructural decay further generated a sense of what Barbora called Orlík’s ‘accumulated power’. She said, ‘a relic of these troops is the devastation of nature here, but nature has found her own way, so [these places] are now overgrown again’ (WS1). Antonie spontaneously captioned Jelena’s shot in Figure 5 Orlík’s Pripyat, whereby she conjured up the spectral traces of the Ukrainian town that became uninhabitable for humans in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear power accident. As she pointed out, in the abandoned prefabs once inhabited by Soviet troops ‘you can see how forceful nature is, that these trees, these birch trees, are able to break through the concrete, so that they’re just growing and overrunning the buildings there, it’s unbelievable!’ (WS2). When viewed up close, infrastructural ruination never stands still: the hard surfaces of the concrete buildings that once embodied the Communist ethos of low-cost housing are now vulnerable to the weather, to microbes, and to the mobile seedlings of plants, so that forms of life are born out of infrastructural ‘death’.

If what Murphy (2017) calls alter life refers to ‘a state of already having been altered by environmental violence that is nonetheless a capacity to become something else’ (5), infrastructural remainders are, or can be, sites of alternate socialities. The weedy plants that rooted themselves in the cracks of roads, abandoned houses, or in the untended grassland between the prefabs (Figure 6) turned the photographers’ attention to that which resourcefully persists despite, or perhaps because of, destruction and neglect.

Examples of this attentiveness were the photographs of two anthills that Antonie had been visiting over three years. Her interest in the doings of the ants was incited by her belief that someone had tried to destroy the hill and yet ‘the ants survived’ (WS2). In her opening remarks to our exhibition at the Museum for Romani Cultures she recalled

Figure 6. Jelena, Untitled.

I liked the contrast between the ruins, that the ants just live there and build a huge anthill and every year the anthill grows. So, on the one hand, there is a feeling of ruination, something broken, and on the other new life announces itself, even if only the ants.

Postmilitary landscapes offer opportunities for encountering the more-than-human socialities that are welded into Orlík’s infrastructural de/composition. Across different histories and sensoria, we can see in the snapshots glimmers of forms of attachment and solidarity that are not based on likeness, relations of use, or reciprocity. These attachments become manifest in the ability to pay attention and realise a connection to that which builds ‘its own’ way of life, indifferent, but not invulnerable, to human intervention (Lorenz-Meyer 2017, 438).

The wandering prompted by the invitation to take photographs thus sparked sensory memories of and an attention to what is presently absent or remains unseen, a capacity crucial for a black sense of place. Over the course of the project this infrastructural memory-making had come under threat. Larisa, who had been taking snapshots along a military road (Figure 2), informed us that ‘all these ruins have already been bought up!’ (WS 4) by an investor who planned to construct weekend houses for affluent white Czechs. Orlík’s municipality meanwhile had begun to demolish some of the 180 remaining Soviet ruins that were now considered safety hazards. Faced with the impending destruction of the ruins, Antonie urged us to wander into ‘Orlík’s Pripyat’ and to pay attention when ‘bumping into such sites’ (WS3) – an invitation to witness the power of the natural world and to memory-creation. For if sensory memory is geocorporeally implicated in the women’s imagination, the destruction of infrastructural rem(a)inders does not only precipitate the erasure of a past that many wish to forget but also diminishes the possibility of imagining alternative infrastructural arrangements that are shared with others, human and not. Some infrastructural remains, however, the women had already ingested. It is to the modality of the metabolism and how it constitutes a black sense of place in the flesh that I shall turn now.

Metabolism

Premature deaths

When we projected the snapshot in Figure 7 at the workshop, the women immediately recognised the uranium pumps which were widely rooted in Orlík’s forests and savannah. The affective and mnemonic power of the photograph, however, revealed itself only later. An initial sense of the pump’s activity was expressed in relation to a shot of a shimmering pond, whose invisible contaminants had killed the fish: an infrastructural reminder of the technology of in situ leach mining (ISL) that the photographer explained ‘used sulfuric acid and chemically dissolved [uranium]. They only removed one percent [of the acid]. Everything else is still in the ground’ (WS2). As a less expensive method of uranium extraction, ISL was widely used in Orlík and the adjacent land between 1967 and 1996. Until the late 1980s, most of the extracted uranium was sent to the Soviet Union for its nuclear power programmes. Over four million tonnes of sulfuric acid and other chemicals were pumped underground and thoroughly contaminated the soil, a river, and an underground aquifer (Calla Association 2010). Groundwater remediation efforts were only started in 1996 and will continue for decades, if not centuries, in this area (Mudd 2001).

Figure 7. Antonie, Uranim Nature.

For the women, an inconspicuous shot of a prefabricated apartment building in Orlík called to mind the nearby underground uranium mines – and Romani work in the mines:

Eva: Those are beautiful flats. Really. Beautiful.

Staňa: They were built by the state when the uranium mines were operating in Z; it was quite affluent. When I came here in 1975, I worked in the mines and my sister did too.

Jelena: My cousins were miners there too. And they died really young, one died just like that. Ondra. How old was he? 36?

Staňa: He was 33, only he died from his heart, a stroke – not from this.

Jelina: Please! Look at your brother, who also worked there.

Staňa: Right.

Jelina: And he died, too. Eda was 27.

Staňa: So, at that time they constructed [these prefabs] because of this, everything was built […] And people liked that because they had new apartments. (WS2)

What I find disconcerting in this exchange is the absence of affect in the women’s matter-of-fact accounting of the premature deaths of Romani miners – close family and friends, as indicated by the diminutive forms of their names (Ondra for Ondrej; Eda for Eduard) – and the dispute over whether their deaths had been caused by uranium mining. It seems that where the metabolic inhalation of infrastructural remainders – uranium oxides or radon dust and their peregrinations into the lungs, liver, and bones of uranium miners – would appear to be undeniable, its effects remain uncertain. Uranium had been identified early in the 20^th century as responsible for the high death rates observed among miners in the uranium-rich Czech German mountains (Voyles 2015). But low-level radiation does not register with the senses, and no protective equipment was given to miners in the Orlík area (Calla Association 2010). Even the few longitudinal studies that have shown a five-fold increase in mortality from lung cancer of men mining uranium in the 1950s compared to the national average do not irrefutably isolate the effects of mining from factors such low-level radiation around mining sites (Ševc et al. 1993). And since the latency period is 15 to 25 years for lung carcinoma (Kolářová 2015) ingested radionuclides have been and continue to be ‘a potential not yet manifest, a past not yet felt’ (Murphy 2013, 3).

Complicating the emphasis on the resistance that underwrites a black sense of place (McKittrick 2011), Gunaratnam (2003, 118) has observed that black subjects sometimes attribute violent racist acts to the individual failings of the perpetrators ‘rather than seemingly unchangeable and structured racialized relations [thereby] constructing the possibility that processes of racism are not impossibly systematic’. Sometimes the persistence of racial violence is too much to bear. In this light, Staňa’s objection that the deaths of relatives resulted from an unspeakable ‘this’ dismisses the possibility that State actors had knowingly calculated the possible deaths of Romani miners to be a negligible risk. Her dismissal raises the possibility that the history of the violence and annihilation of Roma bodies in the Czech lands (Guy 1998) is not entirely systematic and unchangeable. And the survivors’ not disclosing what it meant to nurse and to survive family members who died from cancer could be a refusal to be (re)traumatised as much as it is a refusal to perpetuate stereotypes about black ‘brokenness’ (McKittrick) in a society that does not acknowledge these Romani labours and deaths.

Invisible uranium residues constitute what Jonker and Till (2009) call ‘spectral traces’ of racial violence that cannot be fully metabolised or transformed into public memory and so continue to haunt the nation. This absence of social memory continues to thwart the compensation of survivors and buttresses the possibility that uranium extraction in Orlík might yet resume when it is politically expedient, as municipal representatives had stated. Native American activists aptly call such dormant uranium mines ‘zombie mines’ (Voyles 2015).

Ingesting place

The spectres of these indigestible remainders appeared months later, when we were re-viewing the image of the uranium pump, activating an insistent knowing – or, more succinctly, an understanding within not-knowing – that appeared in the fragments of an infrastructural history comprised in this object.

Jelena: My husband also worked in the mines, and a lot of friends worked there and are dead.

Antonie: I read statistics that there is a greater incidence of cancer in this area.

Jelena: Well, they all died. And this Vašek also worked in the mines. He came from Slovakia for work, and recently died.

Sofie: I don’t know, I’m not a long-term resident.

Barbora: Nobody here is a long-term resident! We’ve all washed ashore here! (laughter)

Sofie: From what I’ve read, the contamination here is long-term, and they’re still working on the clean-up. […] Because if it wasn’t, those things wouldn’t have happened

Jelena: But they were! […]

Antonie: So, it is in fact Uranium Nature!

Sofie: Please, you can’t say that! Because we know that something is here, but it’s not like everything is contaminated. What are we infected with?

Antonie: Uranium! Look, the mushrooms grow faster, everything is growing faster, accelerated nature! (laughs) (WS5)

If we follow the energetics of this encounter, we again notice the absence of a narrative that conveys the experience of loss. Following the ironic laughter that signals something disconcerting helps to pinpoint the difficult incorporations of a black sense of place. First, the humorous assertion that all the women had ‘washed ashore’ in Orlík renders these residents castaways but does so in a way that affirms their belonging and embodied knowledges. It reveals that the afterlives of uranium are familiar even to women who arrived after the mining stopped. The second eruption of laughter suggests why this might be the case. Echoing the laughter at the industrial pipes of Litvínov, this laughter acknowledges the enduring contamination and transmutation of Orlík’s mushrooms, which appear to thrive on uranium deposits. Insidiously, the debilitating effects of racial and environmental violence metabolises through the flourishing mushrooms that sustained the women’s bodies and livelihoods. At no point were the workshops more light-hearted than when the women shared memories of foraging: the tightly guarded secrets of where to find ‘fairy-tale mushrooms’ (WS3), the anticipation, overflowing buckets of collected mushrooms that produced earnings as well as tasty meals – ‘God, they were good!’ (WS3) – for those who knew which ones were edible and how to prepare them.

The scandal of exuberant uncontainable Uranium Nature is that the infrastructural afterlives of acids and radionuclides are not confined to the lungs of miners. By way of metabolism, these isotopes – radioactive and not – trickle through the water into the plants and animal bodies and become a contaminated life force. This suggests that a black sense of place constitutes through movement, memory, and the differential incorporation of an infrastructural landscape, so that all our bodies that have been eating and breathing in Orlík are geocorporeally ‘infected’ and recomposed, albeit unequally so. This shared and racialised vulnerability to geochemical ingestion becomes available when attending to the bursts of laughter and to memory snatches that often arrived with delay and made palpable the inter-implications of death within life, and ruination within flourishing, where metabolism refers to the fleshy registering of the insensible and indeterminate. Significantly, the women neither repudiated nor simply accepted such differential contamination and vulnerability. This became apparent in Sofie’s plan to extend the infrastructures of foraging to the collection and recycling of electronic waste that people continued to dump into Orlík. In sharing this initiative, Sofie affirmed the presence of ‘this dirt, this mess, this waste. Now there’s nonlife! But [Orlík] doesn’t have to be a wasted place, it’s this excessive vast beautiful space where you can create new things, a new place for some life!’ (WS6). I read this plan, devised by people who are so often considered trash and sometimes served as municipal waste workers (Figure 8), less as an attempt to repudiate hazardous waste than an endeavour to participate in its decomposition in ways that make space for current and future existence.

Figure 8. Eva, Untitled.

Conclusion

This article showed how Romani women’s snapshot photography in a postmilitary area can expand the analytics of a black sense of place (McKittrick 2011) by revealing how a black sense of place constitutes and with what effects. The article elucidates modalities of appraising mundane infrastructural remnants – the ways in which they perpetuate racial violence, are incorporated and reimagined in unexpected connections with others – through movement, memory, and metabolism. In contrast to the power of the personal stories and political alliances of black women prison abolitionists that McKittrick (2011) highlighted as constitutive for a black sense of place, snapshot photography makes tangible such modalities of knowing infrastructure that do not necessarily congeal into stories and activism but ­nevertheless remain stirring. Following the photographic practices of the participants, I suggested that in the absence of a determinate photographic referent or story we can shift the focus from representation to what materialises aesthetically, sensually, and mnemonically in snapshot encounters. As an invitation of moving and sensing snapshot photography generates snapshots not merely on film but also as snaps of memory, thought, and affect. Together these snapshots appraise infrastructural remnants though different sensory modalities and reveal the women’s astute feelings and critical thinking of infrastructural arrangements.

In the series of snapshots that were produced as the women move along a path, movement is a way of kinaesthetically sensing the geocorporeal force that infrastructural arrangements like the heating pipes habitually impose on the senses. Significant for a black sense of place is that, even though the photographers are accustomed to these structures, they do not become invisible nor are they ever taken for granted as they tend to be for people whose lives are supported by these infrastructural arrangements (Star 1999). Movement is a force through which infrastructure is perceived as a force field and a monument that make racial inequality palpable. Within this extended analytics of a black sense of place, memory entailed the capacity to see what was absent in the present and to attend to other life forms that persist in infrastructure’s decomposition. These infrastructural mnemonics were not steeped in postsocialist nostalgia but kept the memory of ­dispossession alive and thereby incited the imagination and motivation for infrastructural re-composition. Metabolism refers to the differential ­incorporation of an infrastructural landscape that is not immediately available as a story: the indeterminate potential of chemical isotopes, the loss of loved ones, and other infrastructural infections whose traces appear in laughter and in the attention to death within life.

These three modalities point to the ongoing implication of bodies and postmilitary land that I have flagged with the notion of geocorporeality. Geocorporeality refers not to a stable matter or ground but to the stirring force of bodily and earthly materialisations. It helps specify the different ways in which infrastructural corpuses (human and not) and knowledges differentially co-compose and decompose through and within the geos – or the earth: as quotidian dis-sent, a refusal to forget, to stay in place, or to speak pain and victimisation, and as infrastructural imagination. Infrastructure is thus not a fait accompli that remains outside of ‘us’, and yet the ways in which it inhabits and inspires those who dwell in a location differ.

As a way of thinking through movement, memory, and metabolism, the analytics of a black sense of place involves black or Romani women who rarely participate in infrastructural development (Davis et al. 2020) and proffers a more careful approach to structural innovation in postmilitary brownfields. Assumed to be wasteland, this land is often considered ideally suited for development, without regard for the lives that persist and flourish there. With respect to the solar energy installations that drew me to Orlík, appraising this infrastructure through a black sense of place asks us to consider whose movements are enabled and disabled by solar enclosures? What alternative connections can be imagined with residents who have incurred energy debt? And who will metabolise the residual heavy metals and fibre dust when the solar panels decompose? I have shown how the method of snapshot photography participates in the collective re-visitations through which a black sense of place is registered in its different modalities. This also concerns the residues of single-use cameras and the chemical film processing that will be metabolised in other wastelands. As noted by Wang and Burris (1997), participatory photography materialises forms of remembrance as well as forgetting. Inevitably there were photographic encounters that I found less conducive to a geocorporeal analysis of a black sense of place. This was the case with the photographic encounters of wayside shrines (Czech boží muka, ‘divine suffering’), spiritual landmarks along the sides of the paths that the women travelled along, which had been erected by Orlík’s earlier Sudeten German residents (Figure 9).

Figure 9. Monika, Untitled.

Wayside shrines are the remainders of infrastructures of faith that survived the Communist demolition of religious sites and the shooting exercises of the Soviet troops. While these spiritual monuments drew the photographers near, it was not clear what memory, imagination, and incorporation they incited. The silence of the Romani photographers fits with the disregard for issues of spirituality within the analytics of a black sense of place. Here I found inspiration in the concept of material spirituality that Puig de la Bellacasa (2015, 60) introduced to encourage a different relation to soil as a living bioinfrastructure that creates a ‘human’s very matter’. Material spirituality points to ‘something that exceeds us individually and collectively, but from within’ (60). This resonates with the emphasis of a relational geocorporeal constitution and the mutual vulnerability of humans and the postmilitary land. Importantly, it begins to suggest that spirituality might not be separate from matter, as it is part of the (re)compositions of ‘nature’: ‘Nature does not die’, Sofie mused. ‘It sleeps and wakes up again. It always comes alive again’ (WS6).

After shooting her last roll of film around the waste sites at Orlík’s former military airport, Antonie told us she was still having visions of a ‘completely ghostly landscape’. She added ‘“The destruction of the landscape is the destruction of the human soul” – a completely fantastic title for the exhibition, right?’ (WS6). A black sense of place attends to the way humans and landscapes are differentiated through their unequal exposure to toxins and other infrastructural remains. In the compositional process of snapshot photography, the encounters with the wayside shrines do not add spirituality to the map of geocorporeal modalities, but their photographic presence sensitises us to the re-composition of spirituality within infrastructural movement, memory, and metabolism. And so, we find that excess within the women’s improvisations of wayfaring and taking photos, the abundance of memory snaps that in turn incite new imaginations and visions, and the indeterminate productivity of metabolic ingestion that together constitute a black sense of place. Material spirituality underscores how the modalities of mattering and (not)knowing this postmilitary landscape transverse and traverse the terrains of mind/matter, technology/spirituality, and geos/corpus and do so with political effect.

Acknowledgements

This article has been a long time in the making. I am grateful for the critical queries of the three anonymous reviewers, to Peta Hinton for her fine ear for nuance, to Robin Cassling for language edits, and to the remarkable women of ‘Orlík’ for sharing their snapshots and for moving and inspiring me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Czech Science Foundation ’17-14893S’.

Notes on contributors

Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer

Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer is senior researcher in the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University and teaches in the Graduate Programme in Gender Studies. Her research emerges at the intersection of corporeal feminisms, technoscience studies and new materialism, currently in relation to participatory photography, solar energy, and alternative energy futures. She recently co-edited Feminist Technoecologies: Reimagining Matters of Care and Sustainability (Routledge 2019), curated Romani snapshot photography (c2c Circle of Curators & Critics 2018) and is section co-editor of the journal Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research.