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.