Die Sonne liegt im Erdinnern

At the village edge runs a gravel path, through fields and up to the fence, charted on the map of former uranium mining sites in Saxony and Thuringia. From 1946 to 1990 the Soviet corporation SAG Wismut mined uranium there for the USSR’s atomic weapons program. Above, socialism radiates into the future, below, an ancient rock radiates out of the torn up earth. The GDR environmental movement shines a light on the path. Night. Darkness. A group of people, a flashlight, a strip of X-ray film is buried in the gravel. The ground exposes the film. Die Sonne liegt im Erdinnern [The Sun Beneath the Soil] follows this trace horizontally through the landscapes of today, marked by dismantling and restructuring, and vertically through the ground as an archive. Deep boreholes through space and time track the sedimented narratives surrounding the element uranium, materially, metaphorically, and geopolitically.

Die Sonne liegt im Erdinnern is the ten minutes shorter installation version of the film Sonne Unter Tage [Sun Under Ground].