Black Gold

Although the limits to growth have been visible for some time, the threat to our living environment has long seemed too diffuse for us privileged inhabitants of the global North to react. Although the effects of the upheavals associated with hypercapitalism were omnipresent, we were able to counter the climate crisis and pandemic by retreating into the private sphere and trying to sit out the growing social inequality in the home office (displacement and passivity…)

Today there is war in Europe and we realize that we do not feel able to cope with this situation in any way. What social coping strategies should we fall back on? What social skills do we need to train? Where in our recent history can we condense thought patterns to meet the current challenges?

This project proposes to take the surprising and ambivalent perspective of the miners. Coal mining in underground mines is literally “overexploitation” of nature and people, in no other field of work has there been and still is a comparable mortality and morbidity of the workers. The working situation in the shaft is hostile to life, with between 800 and 1200 meters of earth crushing you, a lack of oxygen, carbon monoxide and methane explosions and, if the pumps fail, drowning from water rushing in. This real threat situation has created a special bond between the miners. Solidarity is not an ethical category here, but a mandatory practice for coping with a hostile working reality.

Basic ph

The integrative model of human coping strategies developed by Mooli Lahad forms the basis of this project. It draws on eyewitness interviews of former miners that were systematically conducted at the Ruhr University Bochum between 2017 and 2021. A valuable contemporary document with experienced and lived stories that can help us to explore our own patterns of coping more closely.

interactive

The play we have developed will look different every evening. We will assign a rich pool of stories based on the interviews to the respective strategies (basic ph) and the audience will be actively involved.

Try Out Event