Locations: Berlin, Schwedt, Greifswald/Lubmin

Date: October 5-7, 2026

Organizers: Ksenia Litvinenko (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Erkner) and Susanne Strätling (Freie Universität Berlin, FOR 5856)

In collaboration with Roman Dubasevych (Interdisciplinary Centre for Baltic Sea Region Research and International Research Training Group “Baltic Peripeties” at Greifswald University)

Funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) 

Participants:

Lucie Česàlkovà (Charles University Prague)

Gabriyel Dari (Zurich)

Roman Dubasevych (Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald)

Nikolay Erofeev (Freie Universität Berlin)

Bilge Firat (University of Texas at El Paso)

Per Högselius (KTH Stockholm) 

Ksenia Litvinenko (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Erkner)

Lea Nienhoff (Universität Basel)

Leyla Sayfutdinova (University of Glasgow)

Evgeni Shoifet (Greifswald)

Mathilde Stangenberger (Freie Universität Berlin, FOR 5856)

Susanne Strätling (Freie Universität Berlin, FOR 5856)

Workshop Concept

Resource exploitation and energy infrastructures do profoundly transform spaces and spatial experiences. This concerns not only the geopolitical zoning of areas with regard to their raw material deposits and the territorial markings of “resource nationalism” (Koch/Perreault 2019). It also involves the relationship between centers, where resource revenues mostly flow, and the peripheries, where the extraction, processing, and transport of resources are mostly located. And it deeply affects the consequences for the habitability and livability of spaces as much as the perception of a space crisscrossed by cables, rays, pipelines, routes, wind turbines, oil rigs, cooling towers and other forms of energy architectures.  

A crucial aspect of resource regions is their transitory quality. Global climate change is not the first indication that energy and raw material issues can hardly be isolated locally. Raw material interests were early drivers of colonization and military intervention, and energy transfers are a pillar of globally networked trade. Large technical systems cross or avoid national borders and territories in a crisis-prone manner. Energy transmission systems thus always function as “routes of power” (Jones 2014). At the same time, resource and energy transfer conduits are also routes of migration, resettlement, and relocation. Not only goods but also people move along the corridors of canals, power lines, routes, and pipelines. Energy transfer zones are therefore particularly intense places of passage. 

However, these passages do not imply unlimited accessibility and transition. Hardly any other field works as much with boundaries as energy policy. While resource extraction has been characterized from the outset by the transformability and transgression of territories, it has also led to new encapsulations of spaces. Restricted areas surround both sites of raw material extraction and contaminated areas around damaged power plants, not to mention militarily occupied or geopolitically relevant objects in the energy industry. In all cases, the violent transformation of natural and cultural spaces into energy extraction and processing sites has far-reaching consequences, often with disastrous results for “terminal landscapes” (Diamanti 2021, Feshbach/Friendly 1992, Demetradze/Mirtskhulava 2010, Gardashuk 2024).  

The workshop will examine the transformation of spaces through resourcification and energy infrastructure projects, with a specific focus on pipelines and the German landing stations of two major East-West pipelines. Even though pipelines – especially transregional pipelines – cover an enormous space, the public tends to ignore them until their smooth operation is disrupted. Thus, they remain not only literally buried in the ground or at the bottom of the sea, but also conceptually “hidden in plain sight” (Wilson/Carson/Szeman 2017: 5), along with the raw materials they transport. This blindness to the infrastructure of resource transport goes hand in hand with a neglect of the spaces through which this transport takes place. They are territories of passage, energetic transit zones, an unmarked “space of flows” that is reduced to its function as a transit corridor under the primacy of “moving along” (Ghosn 2016: 166). The workshop aims to shed light on these concealed spaces by focusing on two border locations. In addition to a kick-off event in Berlin, the workshop will take place in Schwedt (landing point of the northern branch of the Družba oil pipeline and location of the PCK oil refinery) and Lubmin/Greifswald (landing point of the Nord Stream pipelines, location of the last nuclear power plant in the GDR and, since 2024, LNG terminal).

PROGRAM 

October 5, Berlin (public) 

Location: Research Group “Energien der Vernetzung / Energy Entanglements”, Freie Universität Berlin, Ihnestraße 26, Room 202
9:00      Gathering and coffee 

9:30      Opening remarks

9:45      Panel I 

Bilge Firat: Legacy Infrastructures and Infrastructural Legacies

Per Högselius: Atomic Shocks of the Old: Putting Water at the Center of Nuclear Energy History

Ksenia Litvinenko: Logistical Landscapes of West Siberian Petroleum Extraction

Leyla Sayfutdinova: From Extraction to Consumption: Transforming Baku’s Landscapes

Nikolay Erofeev: The Nicaro Route: Cuban Nickel, Soviet Batteries and the Landscapes of Energy Storage 

Moderator: Susanne Strätling 

11:45    Lunch

12:45    Panel II 

Lucie Česàlkovà: Steel Bonds, Fluid Friendships

Mathilde Stangenberger: “Living with the Pipeline”. Transformations, Circulations, and Topographies of Energy Infrastructures in Eastern Europe

Susanne Strätling: Territories of Transition. Mapping Space in the Pipeline Traffic Between East an West

Gabriyel Dari: Drushba Friendship - Post Fuel Landscape 

Moderator: Ksenia Litvinenko 

15:00    Transfer to Schwedt 

October 6, Schwedt (workshop participants only) 

09:45    Walk along a segment of the Drushba pipeline (guided by Gabriyel Dari)

12:00    Lunch 

12:30    City tour on foot with Lea Nienhoff 

16:00    Transfer to Greifswald 

October 7, Greifswald (workshop participants only) 

8:30      Transfer to Lubmin 

9:00      Tour of Lubmin Industrial District with Nord Stream landing station (no access!) (guided by Evgeni Shoifet) 

10:00    Guided tour of decommissioned GDR Nuclear Power Plant “Bruno Leuschner”

13:00    Lunch

14:30    Transfer to Greifswald 

15:00    Panel at Interdisciplinary Research Center for Baltic Sea Region Research (Interdisziplinäres Forschungszentrum Ostseeraum / IFZO)

15:00 Alexander Drost-Wollbrecht (IFZO): Welcome and Brief introduction to IFZO 

15:10 Till Reinholz (U Greifswald):  Wetland Restoration as a Nature-Based Negative Emissions Technology—An Interdisciplinary and Comparative Legal Study in the Baltic Sea Region

15:20 Julius Greiwe (U Greifswald): Energy Systems

15:30 Jan-Hinnerk Antons (U Greifswald): The Oil Era in the Baltic Sea Region: Motor of Modernity and Ecological Hazards 

15:40-16:00 Q&A 

16:00    Closing discussion 

October 8 (Thursday)  

Return to home destination or to Berlin