Dark Matter

A trace of regularly ordered mounds of earth. In the twilight a dump truck is being loaded. A thick veil of mist hangs over the tops of the trees. Dark earth is excavated, loaded and transported off the scenery. In Dark Matter (2020), via the situative arrangement of different picture elements a visual friction surface is created, which is shaped by the figurations of a post-apocalyptic landscape. The images are determined by the processes of extracting raw materials. Without the mineral resources from the numerous diamond and gold mines in the so-called Russian Federation subject Yakutia, the Soviet Union would never have been able to exist until the 1990s.

Technology and ideology go hand in hand and leave their mark. Military and economic efforts to secure power are inscribed in this landscape. The extraction of raw materials and the exploitation of nature show their planned economic and geopolitical consequences, which make up the character of the “subjects of the Federation”. Their designation as “subjects” was introduced in the USSR in order to equip and administer different categories of territorial units with different degrees of autonomy. Technological progress and ideological utopias constitute a processual and changeful network of relationships between subject definition and state apparatus.