Ancient stone, my sweet frontier. On mapping a sacrifice zone
Christoffer Gert
Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design and Conservation
The project, Ancient Stone, My Sweet Frontier, maps a Sacrifice Zone in the Romanian Apuseni Mountains. Proposing a method for accessing a zone sacrificed for the purpose of extraction. The Valley of Valea Şesei is flooded with mining waste from a nearby Copper mine, Roșia Poieni, Europe’s Second largest Copper deposit. Here, beneath a still expanding tailings dam, lies the Village of Geamăna buried, with few inhabitants still resides on the Tailings Edge. The project explores the relation between Mapping, Archiving and Animation as a method for Speculative Cartography and Counter-Narratives of Ancestral Lands sacrificed in the forge of extraction. In search of critical raw minerals, landscapes of extraction are changing rapidly in a growing race for precious metals. Through EU’s Critical Raw Mineral Act, CRMA, the Union searches for bigger independence of critical minerals for a Green Transition, Military Technologies, Data Centers, Electrification, etc. Therefore seeing the expansion and opening of extraction and processing facilities throughout the continent. Valea Şesei and the extraction project Roșia Poieni, is experienced as a concentrated example of the complicated global infrastructure’s local consequences. Here the project engages the Material Witnesses of the landscape as potential indicators of the current material state of the Valley. The Characters become human and more-than-human indicators of the material states of the valley’s ecology, geology, and cultural history. Mapping the Landscape as an Archive. Characters and Witnesses are re-worked into a line of objects that map and diagram the relational forces of the Landscape as a mean of narration. Aesthetically engages and translates processes and phenomena of the Valley into new Material Witnesses. In the friction between Documentary and Fiction the project’s methodology explores the potentials in story telling and narration of the non-heard voices left behind in a landscape of extraction. Here it produces a set of archival methods for the Animation of a landscape in destruction. A crippled land. full project and description on: https://kglakademi.dk/da/projekt/ancient-stone-my-sweet-frontier-mapping-sacrifice-zone