HD video, color, sound
English and German subtitles

Su Yu Hsin’s video Particular Waters offers a nuanced exploration of the intricate relationships between technology, labor, and the environment, focusing specifically on the semiconductor industry in Taiwan. Through her research-based fiction, Su Yu Hsin investigates the massive consumption of resources involved in chip production, with a particular emphasis on water.

The video work centers on the story of a female truck driver working for the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) during a severe drought in 2021. Tasked with transporting water from distant areas to the factory, she becomes a critical link in the company’s supply chain, which relies heavily on water for semiconductor production. The protagonist’s journey reveals the human and environmental impact of TSMC’s operations. As she transports water back and forth, the driver becomes increasingly aware of the broader implications of her work. In a pivotal act of resistance, she decides to disobey her instructions, diverting water away from the factory and returning it to the banks of the Toucian River.

4K color, stereo sound, English, Spanish and O’odham language,
English, Chinese and German subtitles.
Funded by Taiwan National Culture and Arts Foundation

Where Clouds Once Formed traces Arizona’s landscape transformation as the desert becomes a new hub for Al and semiconductor production. Moving through its altered waterways, the film reveals the tension between technoutopian promise and the ecological realities of a drought-ridden terrain. Guided by offscreen voices and the rain-calling Cloud Song of Tohono O’odham poet Ofelia Zepeda, it offers a poetic countercurrent that foregrounds ancestral knowledge against the expanding infrastructure of industrial “cloud” computing.

4K color, stereo sound, English language
English and German subtitles
Commissioned by the GfZK Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig

Clouds sit low as the coal transport train crosses the hilly terrain in Dresden-Gittersee. Saxony’s post-mining landscape serves as a snapshot of humanity’s evolving quest for sunlight from above and below-extracting fossilized energy through coal and uranium, then converting sunbeam into information and energy by silicon crystals. Silicon, Earth’s second most abundant element, forms thebackbone of computer chips and solar panels. After quartz being exploded from rock faces, melted down in a roaring of the furnace, and pulled out from the molten bath, the film traces the material processing of silicon sediments in the landscape. The pure silicon plant, planned atop former Gittersee uranium mines, was contested by the local environmental movements, which heralded the end of the GDR.

The research-based film delves into the region’s hidden silicon value chain, which is revived by today’s developments of Silicon Saxony. The future promises of the silicon landscape are hard to grasp on theground. Moving horizontally across the former open cast mining sites carpeted with solar panels andvertically through archives and geological strata. The film examines how these regional stories relate to the global sweep of the Al supply chain, which its extractive politics registered below the ground.

video: Thea Aae

Installation at Neue Nationalgalerie on the occasion of Festival of Futures Now, 2025.

Video: Studio Fabian Knecht

video: Thea Aae

Director / Producer: Marietta Auras
Camera: Nico Wegewitz
Camera Assistant: Elsa Méchin-Angot
Editor: Gal Yaron Mayersohn
Voice Over: Su Yu Hsin
Sound Design: Belia Winnewisser 
Sound Mix: Adam Asnan
Research Footage: provided by the artist