Eternal Ghosts examines renewable energy infrastructures as places where technology and nature intersect. Rather than viewing these structures solely as instruments of power production, I consider them monumental constructions that shape cultural understandings of energy.
Drawing on animistic cosmologies from Thailand, where Buddhist traditions perceive natural forces as spirits, I examine these architectures as sacred sites that harbor invisible powers, thereby placing Western notions of resources, extraction, and pragmatism in a new context.
Eternal Ghosts examines renewable power plants as sites of interconnection between human technology and natural physical forces. Through an animistic perspective, I approach energies as actors with their own agency. The monumental dimensions of these infrastructures invite a sacred reading of their purpose, raising the question of whether they function as extensions of extractive dynamics or as monuments in their own right.
Drawing on Buddhist-influenced animist cosmologies in Thailand and Southeast Asia, the project compares contemporary energy infrastructures to cultural understandings of natural forces as spirits inhabiting land, water, sunlight, and wind. Inspired by Thai spirit houses (ศาลพระภูมิ), which honour such entities, Eternal Ghosts explores power plants not only as technical constructions but as built sites that host invisible forces. In doing so, the project traces how spiritual and technological narratives shape perceptions of landscape and energy. By reimagining renewable energies as nature spirits, I question Western rational notions of resource, progress, and mastery over nature.
This coexistence of technological infrastructures and spiritual layers forms the field in which the project asks: How are these eternal ghosts understood and engaged with? What kinds of sites host them, and in what ways? How do perceptions of rural and urban landscapes shift when these ghosts are made visible? How are they transformed through technical systems or religious practices?
The project builds on my ongoing research into animated matter. In previous works, I have explored how artificial and organic materials, as well as light and sound, carry traces of nonhuman agency. Eternal Ghosts follows a question posed in my video work A Notion of the ever-lasting: “What would the eternal ghosts, the energies, do?” The film depicts a conversation between deserts reflecting on their potential energies and on human perceptions of them. “The ghosts would look at the maps in wonder,” one desert replies, pointing to the seemingly illogical and colonial ways in which humans divide natural bodies into territories.
Eternal Ghosts extends this trajectory by shifting from studio-based material investigation toward field research in landscapes where energy becomes both material and metaphor. The project seeks to loosen the dominance of European frameworks by engaging with non-European epistemologies and aesthetics.
Grantee
|
Vanessa Bosch |
Project partner / cooperations |
KultX, Baan Noorg, Thapong Srisai
|
Dates and places
|
January to August 2026 Switzerland/Thailand
|
Weblink
|
www.vanny.de
|