‘Think while walking and rest in contemplation of wide open spaces,’ writes Fredric Gros. Think of the calamine violet, which needs a substrate rich in heavy metals to live. Let's look at the disappearing leaves of the cherry tree. Let's see how chemicals and the elements also carry different types of signs, which people and more-than-humans interpret in different ways.

The term elemental turn is used to describe different types of artistic and research practices that focus on the causality of various chemicals and elements in shaping the environments in which people, plants and animals live. Such artistic and research practices are particularly useful in exploring the space of post-mining and post-smelting heaps. This is because they make it possible not only to perceive the dynamic relations between various organic and inorganic actors specific to these spaces. They also make us aware of their entanglement with practices of environmental exploitation and other mechanisms related to the legacy of European colonialism.

Interest in post-industrial areas is described on an ongoing basis. Areas of heaps and dumps, wastelands and industrial waste, are an integral part of post-mining landscapes. As the writer, activist and cultural animator Anna Cieplak says, heaps are the ‘lens of the Anthropocene’ - concentrating the negative effects of human activity and traces of historically changing cultural, political, social and economic processes. Above all, they are a prime example of a place where what anthropologists refer to as ‘the art of survival on a damaged planet’ takes place.

Situated on the border between Bytom and Chorzów, the Żabie Doły Nature and Landscape Complex is an area of approximately 226.24 hectares, covering wasteland, agricultural land, water reservoirs and heaps. It was created in 1997 to protect the habitats of valuable fauna species, mainly waterfowl. Over the centuries, the landscape of the area has been continuously transformed in meaning. Its original shape has been almost completely altered by human activity. At the beginning of the 19th century it had a typically agricultural character, with a small forest complex and a few buildings. At the end of the 19th century, it underwent a slight anthropogenic transformation: the forest was cleared and a railway line was built on its former periphery. Part of the area was within the boundaries of the underground coal mining activities and the Bleischarley Grube (White Charley) zinc and lead ore mine.

More pronounced changes to the landscape took place in the first half of the 20th century, as a result of intensive coal and ore mining, mostly carried out by caving. Deformations were created here in the form of sinkholes, sills and fissures. A pond was created to collect water for the zinc and lead ore mines. In the second half of the 20th century, Żabie Doły were already highly transformed as a result of human economic activity. This was the period of the most intensive coal mining and mining and metallurgy of zinc and lead ores, which led to significant subsidence of several metres of the ground surface. In the resulting subsidence basins characteristic water reservoirs were formed. Mining activity in the area ceased at the end of the 20th century. Subsequently, the area of the Żabie Doły began to be regarded as an area of mining damage and wasteland. For a number of years the area was influenced by natural processes, which eventually resulted in the formation of a specific post-industrial landscape, now seen as a recreational area.

From a 21st century perspective, when we have less and less faith in the planet's ability to absorb the damage we do to it, great iconic works such as Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) seem entirely inappropriate. The devastation with bulldozers, the exploitation of natural resources to realise one man's vision, evoke extreme emotions. We need a new earth art that counters the treatment of nature as an inert material, to remind us that we all live and die as earthly beings, like any other organic material, and that wherever we are, our future as a species is linked to the future of the soil, water and the systems we put in place.