Steffie De Gaetano & Liesbeth Huybrechts

The EU’s neo-extractivist gaze reignites domestic speculation for critical minerals, resurfacing the urgent need to counter entrenched extractive logics.

Legends of the (Under)Ground invites collective reimagination, relation, and re-enchantment with the subsurface through counter prospection and critical cartography.

Through anthropic soil archives of the Campine, participants craft a fictitious core reading, speculatively interpreting its signs via collectively designed a sand carpet and ‘Nether-Stories’. This fabulation crafts divergent (map) legends and cultivates non-extractive imaginaries, re-enchanting with the unknown.

About

Steffie de Gaetano (she/her) is a Dutch-Italian interdisciplinary researcher and PhD candidate at the Faculty of Architecture and Arts, UHasselt, Belgium. Her art-led design research practice focuses on bridging the present polycrisis breakdown to colonial and modern legacies by tracing material systems, matter flows and beyond-human indices. Her doctoral research investigates the mutation of naturecultures produced by fossil fuel industries through the conjunction of (sub)surface landscapes of extraction, while envisioning collective futuring ways forward through the re-enchantment with the underground by art-led practices of counterprospecting.

Liesbeth Huybrechts (she/her) is Professor in the research group Arck, UHasselt, Civic and Policy Design. She has developed a research interest in the design for/with participatory exchanges and processes of capacity building between human and the material/natural environment, and the “politics” of designing these relations. She received a PhD in Cultural Studies with the title “Participatory creation is risky. A roadmap of participatory creation processes and the shifting role of creative things” (KULeuven, April 2011)