Film: Sun under ground (DE 2022, 39 Minutens)
SUN UNDER GROUND is an essayistic film about uranium mining in Saxony and Thuringia during the GDR era. […]Based on conversations with environmentally committed activists, local residents and former miners, our film takes an ecological-political inventory that traces the element of uranium in local mining museums, in archive materials, underground and in today’s restored landscapes. In our film, uranium is thematized as a substance that repeatedly returns to the place and circumstances of its extraction. As cancer in the lungs of the workers, in the form of the cloud that blows over from Chernobyl in April 1986 or under the top layer of the grass-covered slag heaps. This gives uranium a ghostly quality that returns cyclically and points to a temporality that goes far beyond the human scale and and refers to the incompleteness of the atomic age. (Mareike Bernien and Alex Gerbaulet)
Reading: Der Kletterpilz am Ende der Welt. Kindheiten in der Folgelandschaft.
Elisabeth Heyne and Alexander Wagner read from their text “Der Kletterpilz am Ende der Welt. Kindheiten in der Folgelandschaft.” In it, they describe their upbringing after reunification as both a personal and a collective experience. They are able to capture the developments of a country, families, nature and landscape and show that these cannot be separated from one another. Radiant mushrooms shoot out of the ground next to mushroom-shaped climbing frames. New Philips televisions are installed in VEB-fabricated cupboard walls. First coal and ore are mined, then jobs are cut. Landscapes are excavated, abandoned, flooded naturally or artificially. Plants and animals find a habitat in the new landscapes.
The text was published in summer 2024 as part of the anthology “Ostflimmern. Wir Wende-Millenials” published by Mitteldeutscher Verlag. Previously, Deutschlandfunk broadcasted the joint audio essay “Hühner, Kohle, Kernkraftwerke. Gibt es ein ostdeutsches Anthropozän?” about the traces that industry, energy politics and environmental damage of the GDR have left behind in East German soils.
Elisabeth Heyne was born in Görlitz in 1988 and is a literary scholar who runs the project “Changing Natures. Collecting the Anthropocene together” at the Natural History Museum in Berlin. The collection of everyday objects that give an account of human influence on nature can be completed by everyone. In her academic work, she deals with science communication and the history of knowledge as well as concepts of collections, nature and culture in the Anthropocene, including in East Germany.
Alexander Wagner was born in Hoyerswerda in 1987 and wrote his doctoral thesis on the continuities of German colonialism under National Socialism. At the University of Wuppertal, he researches and teaches on topics including East German concepts of the body and energy culture. He works with artists and academics as a freelance curator, for example on the Ostschule project, which also made a stop in Chemnitz in 2023 after Freiberg and Bielefeld.
Sonne Unter Tage (Filmstill), ©Pong Film – Mareike Bernien und Alex Gerbaulet