Toxic Dust is an artistic survey that investigates Ostrava’s post-mining landscapes – terrains continuously reshaped not only by more than a century of extraction, but also by the complex processes of abandonment and natural reclamation that have occurred over the decades since. It offers a poetic tool for navigating these altered landscapes and proposes an alternative approach: one that does not reduce them to a single narrative of decay, but instead attends to their current conditions, their ongoing transformations, and their entanglement with human and other-than-human processes.

The city bears the traces of extensive digging and dumping, the rise and fall of blast furnaces, underground shafts, and worker colonies – many of which were abandoned after the Velvet Revolution in 1989. While some small-scale ironworks are still in operation, the last major ironworks closed in 1998. Yet their legacy of industrial toxicity remains embedded in the soil, air, and water.

While Ostrava has initiated a transition project to deal with these vast post-industrial remnants, much of this effort is geared towards transforming former mining sites into museums and attraction parks. These projects often monumentalise extraction rather than engage with its ongoing material and ecological consequences: soils heavy with metals, subsiding grounds, underground fires, and spontaneous forests growing from contaminated soil. These are not only residues of the past but active processes that continue to reshape the city’s terrain today and reflect the interaction between natural processes, scientific interventions, and governance shaped by political cycles and their short-term agendas.

Accessibility is a recurring issue across these post-mining sites. Although they hold ecological, pedagogical, and cultural value, access is often restricted by private ownership, unclear jurisdictions, or limited political imagination at the municipal level. Even minimal interventions – trails, signage, simple platforms – could make them publicly accessible without the need for large-scale or costly projects. While some trails and basic infrastructure have been installed, much of Ostrava’s post-mining landscape remains inaccessible for now.

This project began with an invitation from curator Edith Jeřábková to a two-phase residency at PLATO Municipal Gallery. The first, in February 2024, was when I began walking some of these sites with geomorphologist Jan Lenart, an assistant professor at the Department of Physical Geography and Geoecology of the University of Ostrava, specialised in geomorphology and industrial landscape transformations. The second, in May 2025, expanded the fieldwork and deepened our conversations. Jan provided geological and ecological knowledge, tracing each site’s processes and historical transformations. He contributed not only his expertise, but also a clear commitment to these landscapes and their future possibilities. My approach, shaped by critical spatial practices, focused on how these processes manifest materially, spatially, and culturally. Walking became both the research method and narrative frame: moving through the terrain, noticing details, following traces, listening to the stories. Artist Julian Irlinger accompanied the walks, creating the photographic record of the project.

The field guide presented here is the outcome of this research and collaboration. It brings together seven site-specific texts, each grounded in direct observation and shaped by conversations, archival research, and, at times, associative comparisons to other landscapes. Each entry is both a record and an interpretation, attending to the site’s textures, histories, and atmospheres. Across the entries, certain themes recur: the layering of natural and industrial processes; the ways fire, water, and vegetation alter the terrain; the contested politics of naming; the tension between care and neglect.

It also opens a space for reflection: How do we relate affectively to inherited anthropogenic landscapes? And what does it mean for generations rooted in this area, with no direct connection to the mining industry or its labour histories, yet who live among the terrains it left behind?

Rosario Talevi
Berlin, August 2025

It rained overnight. The terrain is wet, forming puddles of water. Shoes get muddy. We are trekking through a patch of forest; the trail here is rougher than the ones before. We cross some train tracks, once used to transport black coal from the nearby mines to the main railway network. After the tracks, the terrain gently dips into what appears to be a large reed field, ending in a pond. A path cuts through the dense reeds. This is definitely periodically maintained. Without human trimming, the reeds – rhizomatically organised, strong and fast reproducers – would close the opening, becoming a single uninterrupted mass: an enormous filter, a natural cleansing device.

We walk closer to the shore. Now, we’re standing at the edge of Heřmanice Pond, on the original floodplain of the Odra River. Before mining, this area was part of a vast network of fishing ponds. Today, only a few remain. Several mines operated directly beneath us, causing significant subsidence that has reshaped the ground surface. Heřmanice Pond is now more swampy. The water level is extremely low, often just a few centimetres. Islands of vegetation have begun to emerge inside the pond, with marsh-like edges where open water once flowed.

Jan points out to the far margin, about half a kilometre away, while explaining that subsidence has caused the pond to tilt; “There it still holds water, while the bank where we stand is mostly dry.”

A complex and polluted mix feeds its waters. On the eastern side, an old channel still delivers mining water into the pond. These waters originate from geological formations hundreds of metres below ground: ancient, mineral-rich aquifers confined for millions of years. The water is salty and heavy with dissolved minerals. Then there is leachate from the spoil heap above, which is still actively burning. Finally, untreated wastewater from nearby settlements – parts of Ostrava are still lacking a proper sewage system – adds sodium, phosphorus, and other nutrients, encouraging algal and bacterial growth.

The pond has a series of floating dachas connected by small bridges, each equipped with a clever, improvised locking system to prevent trespassing, and which keeps us from entering. This land (and water) is still owned by the former mining company, which was required to purchase it before extraction could begin. However, the fishing huts were later sold to a fishing club from Valašské Meziříčí, a town not so nearby. Here, fishermen from elsewhere come to fish, not for sustenance, but for the act of fishing itself. I can’t help but wonder if these fish are incredibly toxic. Do they thrive here, or merely survive?

Despite the toxicity of the water, new species of birds have settled in this young, emerging ecosystem. The pond, with its vast patches of reeds, is strangely beautiful. Locals call this area the “Ostrava Vietnam”.

We walk along the shore, approaching a shallow stretch of water. There, we spot thousands of fish – catfish, perhaps – moving sluggishly through the muddy shallows. What are they doing here? And why are they all gathered in this sludgy spot? Up close, the fish appear unwell. The pastoral, romanticised image of the fishermen’s pond, with their floating huts, fades away.

On the other side of the pond, our next stop awaits: the largest spoil heap complex in Ostrava. If Jan hadn’t explained that what looks like a natural elevation is in fact another burning heap, I would have taken it for a mountain. A mountain beside a pond.

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