Current Projects (2024-25)

Buried Secrets – Responses to Raw Materials Exploitation

Mining doesn’t disappear, it just happens somewhere else. If raw materials had a memory and could tell us their story, we would have a very different historiography of the earth – their transformation process would become an epic poem; their mourning for the drilling of the earth’s crust would sound like the description of a war; the tragedy of their interrogation with indigenous peoples and migrant workers would be harrowing and unforgettable.

The partnership proposal ‘Buried Secrets’ is a series that brings together artists, venues, NGOs and civil society to examine the profound consequences of extractivism on earth and its inhabitants. One performance and three media artworks will be presented together with discussions or workshops at Freie Werkstatt Theater (Germany), SCIAENA (Portugal) and KOMUNA WARSZAWA (Poland).

The performance ‘Out of the Blue’, focusing on deep-sea mining, plunges the audience 4500 metres under the Pacific Ocean. Three video installations extend the theme to other geopolitical contexts – ‘Billion Years of Echoes’ on the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, ‘Dark Matter’ on the Mirny diamond mine in Siberia, and ‘Kris Project I’ on the colonial raw material trade in British Malaya.

Perform Europe Grant

EUR 60,000

Partners

Freies Werkstatt Theater Cologne

Artistic Works

Out of the Blue

Producers: Silke Huysmans & Hannes Dereere

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After 'Mining Stories' and 'Pleasant Island', Silke Huysmans and Hannes Dereere present the final part of their trilogy on mining. This time, they focus on a new industry: deep-sea mining. With resources on land becoming increasingly scarce and overexploited, mining companies are turning towards the ocean.

In the spring of 2021, three ships gather on a remote patch of the Pacific Ocean. One of them belongs to the Belgian dredging company DEME-GSR. Deep below the sea surface, their mining robot scrapes the seabed in search of metals. On another ship, a team of marine scientists keep a close watch on the operation. A third ship completes the fleet: on board the Rainbow Warrior, Greenpeace activists protest against this potential future industry.

Each ship represents a pillar of the public debate: industry, science, and activism. Through a series of conversations, an intimate portrait of this new industry emerges. ‘Out of the Blue’ attempts to capture a potentially pivotal moment in the history of the Earth. How much deeper can mining companies dig, and what are we, as humankind, actually digging towards? What challenges, risks, and opportunities potentially lie ahead?

Billion Years of Echoes

Producers: Naoko Tanaka

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The essay film ‘Billion Years of Echoes’ is based on drawings from Naoko Tanaka's journey to the contaminated zone of Fukushima and transforms real encounters into magical narratives. Using the analog process of drawing and erasing, the pencil drawings that emerge and disappear in this way develop a life of their own. The concepts of creation, the forces of nature and humankind differ radically from conventional narratives.

Dark Matter

Producers: Viktor Brim

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Viktor Brims camera language observes and documents places of the past and present state of raw material production through apocalyptical, monumental images. In his recent film ‘Dark Matter’, Brim introduces a new level of abstraction: Out of dense fog, remains of debris, power poles, and sparsely lit industrial plants dimly crystallise. The seemingly apocalyptic scenery alternates with landscapes whose hilly forms evoke the drape of a velvet cloth. Finally, the camera plunges into the huge hole of the world's largest so-called kimberlite pipe at Mirny in Yakutia in northeastern Siberia, which is surrounded by concentric roads. The contours of the diamond mine lose themselves in the deep black of the abyss, like an infinitely slow fall into the bottomless depths.

Kris Project I: The Never Ending Tale of Maria, Tin Mine, Spices and the Harimau

Producers: Sowyee Au

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Continuing on with the threads in the Mengkerang Project and using an imaginary film studio as its base, the artist Sowyee Au continues to imagine, explore, examine, and explore the issues of ‘cultural subjectivity’ in Malaysia and its neighbouring countries. In so doing, it brings out the subtle connections between the 1950s and 1960s Asian/Malaysian film industries (such as MP&GI, Cathay and the Shaw Brothers) and the history of the Cold War.

Using ‘film’ as a method, it juxtaposes film images from various time and places, attempting to escape from linear historical narratives and arrive at the margins of historical memories by means of estranging narratives about the other. The Kris Project I deconstructs the narratives of Indian epic Ramayana along with many other folklores. It creates a ‘pseudo-film’ by separating sound and image, displacing time and space, as well as adding found documents and images collected by the director (Ravi) – thereby allowing viewers to build an awareness of images on their own and to seek out personal readings of history.