SOLU Dialogues: Landscape Machines
10 October 2024 at 18:00-19:00
Panimokatu 1 (3rd floor), 00580 Helsinki

You stand on the southeastern slope of Črna gora, the Black Mountain, 40km east of Ljubljana in Slovenia. A short, late summer rain has just cleared the air, and the old asphalt road releases an aromatic smell of petrichor. You are about to position an array of microphones and sensors to capture the many audible and inaudible frequencies of the sonic and electromagnetic spectrum. You attune yourself to your surroundings and their different scales. You hear the insects and the wind, and on the opposite hill, the harvesting machines. Church bells and a barking dog briefly interrupt the steady hum. With some of your circuitry, you soon expect to listen into the ghostly emissions of the atmosphere, the radio data transmissions of the measurement stations, and the ever-ongoing radioactive decay. You place a set of seismic sensors and remember that your feet stand on pyroclastic Triassic rocks, providing evidence of more than 200 million years of volcanic activity in the area.

Layered on top of those rocks, between two ravines, is Boršt, the hydrometallurgical tailings landfill of the decommissioned Žirovski Vrh Uranium Mine. Boršt confines a silty to sandy aggregate formed during the uranium extraction process. This toxic and radioactive mass is the milled and leached remnant of the interior of the opposite hill where the mine was located. The wind resonates in the fence that stops people and animals from entering. You see how the drainage channels that cut into the landfill are carrying away the rainwater and notice the multiple instrumentation points and antennas which dot its surface. The grass is cut, and there are no bushes or trees within the fenced area. It is maintained. It is held to stand still. While the world around the landfill is busy and keeps moving, the movement of Boršt is undesirable, as it would lead to the spilling of its contaminated heritage. Boršt is kept in a state of assisted stasis and is under continuous observation as part of a long-term stewardship program. Every deviation from the zero state raises concern.

It is an absurd machine – a landscape machine. Though the mining has ceased, the machinic continues to operate in this landscape. It is a machine that does not carry out beneficial work. It does not produce anything; it only indebts the present and deep future. The world would prefer to have it slip from memory and forget it into non-existence. However, the earth’s processes which labour on the landfill, demand that the Boršt machine keep going in a relentless working of forces: transmitting, sending, receiving, computing, projecting, shifting, upheaving, rumbling, leaking, rolling, drilling, excavating, depositing, layering covering, sliding, moving, sinking, crumbling, collapsing, mending, caring, fixing, mowing, repairing, decaying, radiating, outgassing, dissolving, contaminating, measuring, analysing, reading, interpreting, predicting, liquifying, flowing, flooding, drying, breaking, relocating, neutralising, exhausting, waiting and repeating. (exhibition text Landscape Machine Žirovsky Vhr, Berger 2023).

During this iteration of SOLU Dialogues, Erich Berger invites participants for a dialogue about his ongoing engagement with deep time, deep futures and the nuclear contemporary through his art and research practice. The backdrop for this conversation, serving cues and suggestions, is provided by a test-setup of his upcoming solo exhibition Spectral Landscapes at Muu Contemporary Art Centre later this year in November.

Erich Berger is an artist and curator based in Helsinki. He currently works as a doctoral researcher, at the University of Oulu in Finland, where he conducts transdisciplinary research into how artists approach temporalities beyond human-centred time, combining cultural anthropology, geology and art. Throughout his artistic practice, he has explored the materiality of information and information and technology as artistic material. His current artistic focus lies on issues of deep time and hybrid ecology which led him to work with geological processes, radiogenic phenomena and their socio-political implications in the here and now. In his fieldwork-based practice, he carries out extensive work on natural radioactivity, potential uranium mining sites and nuclear infrastructure in Finland and abroad. Berger’s award winning work has been exhibited widely in museums, galleries and major media-art events. http://randomseed.org

Photo: Till Bovermann