dark matter
2020, 1-channel video installation, consisting of 4K video, 19’52”, color, sound, trapezoidal sheet metal, objects
dark matter descends into the Mir crater at Mirny, an open diamond pit worked since 1957, about 525 metres deep and 1,200 metres across, wide enough to be seen from space, with the town’s housing blocks on its rim. A tonne of rock from the pit holds about 0.7 grams of diamond; the rest builds the grey hills around the four towns the film crosses in the ALROSA diamond field in the Republic of Sakha, eastern Siberia: Mirny, Almazny, Udachny and Aykhal. Out of fog come power masts and floodlit plant, then hills folded like cloth, then the machines at the rim and the haul roads winding down into the pit, where the walls give way to black.
Lilian Haberer, written on the occasion of the presentation of the work at KIT (Kunst im Tunnel), Düsseldorf, 2020.
Descending into the KIT exhibition and traversing the long, sloping space with its striking, elliptical concrete architecture calls for an active perception of time. This is already evident at the beginning of the exhibition route with the almost 20-minute 4K video Dark Matter and the artist’s book Imperial Objects (both 2020) by Viktor Brim shown on a display. On a free-standing projection screen in Cinemascope format, a foggy, post-apocalyptic landscape gradually becomes visible with continuous drone sound, and the camera sets off in search of traces of the machines and equipment of precarious wage labor in a diamond and gold mine in Yakutia and into the maelstrom of its crater. As the title succinctly suggests and the artist’s book illuminates in texts with background information, materials such as newspaper articles, postcards and images of the area, the work in the Mir diamond mine around the city of Mirnij is also a dark, dangerous and secret affair. It is protected by the local company Alrosa, but also by the regional government on site and in Moscow. Radioactive material, as well as traces of the heavy metal industry and parts of rockets have turned the area into a toxic landscape. The artist’s book summarizes the topography, history, present and narratives surrounding the mine in several chapters, which are also separated by colour, and provides information about the work and power cycles as well as the surroundings. Reports from the locals on site about explosions, toxic substances, dying animals, devastated nature and supernatural phenomena, a “higher authority”, thus become a polyphonic and lively narrative. During his several-month stay in Mirnij, Viktor Brim collected material about the mining town and life there, as well as focusing on conversations with a worker and on internet forums in which secret information about the experiments taking place there was also discussed. The slow scanning of this barren, enigmatic and gloomy landscape with the camera at the Mir mine, which only shows the machines working the edges of the crater, makes the destruction and danger of the surroundings latently tangible. The artist’s book, on the other hand, reveals the traces and experiences of the people on site; it lends the film images their own depth through the narrative threads of the material.
Florian Wüst, written for VIDEONALE.18, Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2021, on the installation presentation of the work.
Man-made landscapes without people. Steel colossi as tall as houses dig for rock. Furrowed earth, steaming chimneys, heaps of scrap. Viktor Brim documents places in the history and present of raw material extraction: the economy of extraction on which modern life is based. Besides the sheer, incomprehensible scale of these places, the processes hold a temporality that can only be grasped through duration. This is why the artist’s camera stands still when it observes, registers, records. Daniel Burkhardt writes of Brim’s video art: “Through the exact measurement of the duration of his gaze and the precise setting of the frame, he seems to succeed effortlessly in letting the observed narrate itself as if by itself.” Brim thus needs no commentary at all. Instead, the finely arranged sound transmits the never-resting whirr of the machines. In their audiovisual power, his tableaus bear witness to the legacies of the industrial exploitation of the planet, which advances undiminished even under the impression of the climate catastrophe.
In his most recent film Dark Matter, Brim introduces a new level of abstraction: out of dense fog, remnants of debris, power masts and industrial plants emerge faintly in the sparse light of the floodlights. The apocalyptic-seeming scenery alternates with landscape images whose hilly forms evoke the folds of a velvet cloth. Finally the camera dives into the huge hole, ringed by concentric access roads, of the world’s largest so-called kimberlite pipe near Mirny in Yakutia in the north-east of Siberia. The contours of the diamond mine lose themselves in the deep black of the abyss, like an infinitely slow fall into the bottomless. Beside the video projection, the installation space, lined with trapezoidal sheet metal, shows a collection of artefacts in vitrines that point to the political and cultural contexts behind Yakutia’s significance as a resource store of the former Soviet Union and today’s Russian Federation. The likewise exhibited artist book Imperial Objects supplements Brim’s photographic-filmic reappraisal of the complex history of the post-Soviet periphery with personal narratives and reports.
The pit at Mirny is one of the largest holes ever dug, about 525 metres deep and 1,200 metres across (ALROSA figures). Rings of haul roads wind down its sides, so that the wall reads as a stack of terraces; it can be seen from space, and the standard housing blocks of the town sit directly on its rim (Kalemeneva 2025). What the pit cuts into is a kimberlite pipe: a narrow chimney of rock that rose from deep inside the earth, cooled in place, and carried diamonds up with it. The pipe continues far below the floor of the open pit, and the crater is only the widened mouth of that chimney, opened out so that machines can drive in. Open-pit work ran from 1957 to June 2001, 44 years. Mining then went below: an underground mine beneath the pit floor was commissioned in 2009 and ended on 4 August 2017, when water from the pit broke into the tunnels; more than 100 miners were brought out and eight were killed (press reports, August 2017). Since then the founding mine of the field has stood still, and a decision on a new mine at greater depth is pending.
The rock hauled out of the Mir pit is not the product. Kimberlite, the volcanic rock that carries the diamonds, is only the carrier: a tonne of it from the Mir pipe holds on average about 3.6 carats, roughly 0.7 grams, one of the richest grades on record (Vorotnikov 2013). Almost everything else in the tonne is crushed, washed, sorted and set aside, and the waste rock builds the flat grey hills that stand around all four towns of the field. The pipes themselves are old beyond any human measure. Mir belongs to a cluster on the Siberian Platform, the stable block of crust under this part of Siberia, together with Udachnaya and Aykhal; the pipes rose in the Devonian, roughly 364 to 344 million years ago, and carried their diamonds up from the deep mantle, so the stones are older still than the eruption that delivered them. Across the eight districts of the western diamond province, spread over more than 600,000 square kilometres, about 600 kimberlite bodies are known; around 150 contain diamonds, and only a handful are worth mining (Yakovleva et al. 2000). The craters are the brief, recent cut into that time.
The search for diamonds in western Sakha was run from Moscow, and the reason was not jewellery. The Soviet Union needed industrial diamonds for cutting, drilling and grinding, and until then it had to buy them on a world market that De Beers controlled; a field of its own would end that dependence. The first diamond in the region was found in 1949. On 21 August 1954 the geologist Larisa Popugayeva found the Zarnitsa pipe, the first of the kimberlite pipes, the rock chimneys that carry diamonds, to be identified on the Siberian Platform. On 13 June 1955 the geologists Yuri Khabardin, Ekaterina Elagina and Viktor Avdeenko of the Amakinsky expedition found the far richer Mir pipe, and the Udachnaya pipe was recorded two days later. In 1957 the state enterprise Yakutalmaz was created and mining began at Mir (Crate 2002; Yakovleva et al. 2000). The order of priority was fixed from the start and held for years: the pipe and the plant came first, the town came after (Kalemeneva 2025).
The diamond field of western Sakha is worked today by ALROSA, short for Almazy Rossii-Sakha, Diamonds of Russia-Sakha, set up by decree in 1992 as a closed joint-stock company whose shares move only between existing holders. The first holders were the Russian Federation and the Republic of Sakha with 32 per cent each, the company’s employees with 23 per cent, and the eight diamond districts with 8 per cent. In 1993 the deposits and the plant of Yakutalmaz were leased to the company for 25 years, and the rent is the republic’s income: ALROSA agreed to hand the republic 32 per cent of its profits, split into four named parts, 3.5 per cent for using up the deposit itself, 7 for the use of natural resources, 19.5 for the rent of the plant, and 2 for social and ecological programmes in the diamond districts. Between 1993 and 1997 that came to about three billion US dollars (Yakovleva et al. 2000). The company accounts for roughly a quarter of world diamond output and almost all of Russia’s, and Sakha holds close to 80 per cent of the country’s reserves (Vorotnikov 2013). The four towns the film moves through are that field.
From the sorting houses of the diamond field the stones leave the region entirely. In 1962 De Beers agreed to buy virtually the whole Soviet output of uncut diamonds, on the assumption that Mirny would run down within a few years, and in order to keep the stones off the open market. It did not run down. Twenty years on, the deal was still running as a monthly flight: an Aeroflot plane landing at Heathrow with about a million diamonds on board, some fifty million dollars paid into a Soviet account, and the parcels driven to the Diamond Trading Company on Charterhouse Street in London, into a vault that runs four floors down (Epstein 1982). In 2012 the largest share of Russian rough went to Belgium, ahead of India, the United Arab Emirates and Israel (Vorotnikov 2013). The pit and the waste hills stay where they are. The product is graded, priced and gone.
Mirny was founded in 1955, among the first industrial towns built from scratch in the Soviet Arctic after the Second World War, and it was never part of the Gulag legacy (Kalemeneva 2025). That is the whole point of its plan. After Stalin’s death the Thaw took apart the machinery of forced labour, so by 1955 the state could no longer fill the North that way and had to persuade people to go. In May 1956 the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers appealed to the youth organisations to send their best people to the construction sites of the East and the North; the diamond field was declared one of them. The town was drawn in Moscow, by the central design institutes of the Ministry of Non-Ferrous Metallurgy, and set in the taiga, about 1,000 kilometres from Yakutsk, more than 4,000 from Moscow. It grew at the speed of the industry: about 700 people in 1956, more than 6,500 in 1958, more than 18,000 in the early 1960s; nine of ten newcomers were under 45. In 1959 the settlement was granted the rank of a city answering directly to the republic, unusual for a place that size (Kalemeneva 2025).
The film moves through four towns, each a pit with a settlement built to work it, in two groups. In the south, near the Vilyui, are the Mir pipe and Mirny, and 20 kilometres off Almazny, laid out along the Irelyakh, a small river whose gravel holds diamonds washed out of the pipes; floating dredges work that gravel from the water. Some 500 kilometres to the north, in the Daldyn-Alakit field just short of the Arctic Circle, are Udachny and Aykhal; the open pit at Udachny went past 600 metres, among the deepest on the planet, and by 2013 the surface work there was nearly exhausted and the mine was going underground (Vorotnikov 2013). Russian planning has a word for places like these: monogorod, a monotown, a settlement whose whole economy hangs on one enterprise. The state keeps a register of them, 313 across the country, and Mirny, Udachny and Aykhal all stand on it (Russian Government directive 1398-r, 2014). Two of the names are Russian and one is in the language of the land: Mir means peace, Udachny means lucky, Aykhal is a Sakha word of praise. Four company towns, each fastened to a hole.
The northern towns of the diamond field carry the thinking of their decade in their form. Mirny was built as the Thaw’s city of the future, with standard blocks set on the rim of the pit. When planning moved 500 kilometres north to Aykhal and Udachny, it turned radical: architects in Leningrad, working on the problem of how to make a northern town liveable at all, proposed settlements with an artificial climate inside them, where housing and public functions were pulled together under cover and residents would hardly need to step outside. By the mid-1960s Aykhal and Udachny were the projects that carried this idea, and Aykhal became its emblem: a town meant to be closed against the cold it stood in (Kalemeneva 2019).
The Vilyui basin, where the diamond field lies, is not empty land. It is home to the Sakha, a Turkic-speaking people keeping horses and cattle here since the 1400s, and to the smaller Even, Evenk, Dolgan, Chukchi and Yukaghir peoples. Russian colonisation arrived in the mid-1600s, annexed land and levied yasak, the fur tribute (Crate 2002). The doubled name carries that history: Sakha is the people’s own name, Yakut the exonym Russian rule attached to them, Yakutia the name it gave their land; in 1991 the republic renamed itself the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), the self-name placed before the imperial one (Fondahl and Sirina 2003). Collectivisation from the late 1920s pulled a dispersed homestead economy into planned villages and state farms; once the mines opened, their assigned task was supplying the diamond industry with meat and milk. The Sakha share of the population fell from 83 per cent in 1926 to 33 per cent by 1989 (Fondahl and Sirina 2003). In the Sakha’s own account, the gods handing out the earth’s riches froze over this place and dropped the contents of their chest, so that every element of Mendeleyev’s table is said to lie within its borders (Crate 2002).
The mine at Mirny needed power, and the Vilyui below it paid. In 1958 the decision was taken to dam the river at Chernyshevsky, about 100 kilometres from Mirny; filling ran from 1969 to 1973, the first hydroelectric plant built on permafrost (Yakovleva et al. 2000). The reservoir took 356,000 acres of hayfields, pasture and hunting grounds; the settlements along the Chona, where about 600 people lived, went under. It was flooded over uncleared taiga: the drowned vegetation rotted without oxygen and released phenols and copper, which reddened the water and cut the light, and the dam inverted the river’s year, high releases in deep winter when demand peaks, low in spring and summer (Crate 2002). Two more streams reach the same water: thallium, used in separating the stones from the crushed kimberlite, and highly mineralised brine seeping up from beneath the permafrost; heavy metals from the workings are measured far downstream in the beds of the Markha and the Vilyui. The Vilyui districts are home to about 192,000 people, and among their indigenous population cancer rates and congenital anomalies run well above the republic’s average (Yakovleva et al. 2000). Downstream the same water is what the villages drink.
The Soviet Union ran a programme of nuclear explosions for civil engineering, Programme No. 7, and set off an estimated 124 across its territory between 1965 and 1989, for seismic sounding, prospecting, and blasting reservoirs and dams. Twelve were fired in Sakha between 1974 and 1987, ten in the diamond province, and two failed and vented into the open air: Crystal and Kraton-3 (Yakovleva et al. 2000). Crystal was fired on 2 October 1974, at 98 metres depth with a yield of 1.7 kilotons, 2.5 kilometres from Udachny, to blast a dam for the tailings pond of the diamond enrichment plant. The shot was too shallow, threw radioactivity across the surface, and all further work there was stopped. It left a crater 60 metres across and 6 metres deep, which stood open, full of water, until 1990; in 1992 it was filled with barren rock and capped with an artificial mound, off which streams now run into the brook below (Gedeonov et al. 2002). The dead forest around it covers about half a square kilometre (Yakovleva et al. 2000). Udachny and Aykhal, two of the four towns the film moves through, are the settlements nearest the two failed tests.
Kraton-3, the second failed nuclear shot in the diamond province, was fired on 24 August 1978 at a depth of 577 metres, about 40 kilometres from Aykhal, on the Markha; around 20 kilotons, for seismic sounding of the crust. The borehole was not sealed well enough: explosion products came back up within minutes as a plume that passed over the crew’s camp, 2.5 kilometres away, and the men were evacuated through a gamma field of more than 2 grays per hour. The trace it laid down was about 31 kilometres long, up to 1.5 kilometres wide (Ramzaev et al. 2009). Around the borehole the trees and shrubs were dead over about a square kilometre by June 1979, and by 1990 even the lichens and mosses were dying; the stand is called the dead forest, and caesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-239+240 remain measurable in soil, lichen, larch bark and the droppings of elk that walk in to feed (Gedeonov et al. 2002). The site was covered twice: in 1981 contaminated equipment and scraped topsoil were buried beside the borehole, and in 2007 the ground was sealed under geotextile and 1.7 metres of sand and gravel, to keep the buried material permanently frozen.
The four towns of the diamond field lie under a flight path. Since 1958 the Nyurba district, downstream in the Vilyui basin, has been the designated drop area for the second stages of rockets launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the steppe of Kazakhstan, a launch site Russia runs on leased ground. The spent stages come down with the remains of their fuel: heptyl, the trade name of dimethylhydrazine, highly toxic and classified as a possible carcinogen; how many have fallen over the basin is a secret to this day (Crate 2002). What is on record is what the people below report: in October 1983 sixty fishermen saw the first rocket come down, and the stages fall in four, six, eight pieces; hunters find whole herds and flocks of birds lying dead in the taiga where the parts land; in 1991 representatives from Baikonur conceded three falls against the many the residents had counted; calves in the district have been born without skin and with two heads (Crate 2002). The villages link the falling stages to the cancers that have risen among them since the late 1970s.
The two failed nuclear shots in the diamond province were not known locally at the time. Geologists picked up the caesium hot spot from the air in 1984 during a routine survey, without knowing what it was; the regional authorities received the first official account of Kraton-3 in 1990, twelve years after the shot, and the extent of the plutonium contamination became public in 1993 (Ramzaev et al. 2009; Crate 2002). In 1991 the republic declared itself an antinuclear zone, and in 1996 it set up a programme and a department for the aftermath of the peaceful explosions and of uranium mining (Yakovleva et al. 2000). Under glasnost a Sakha citizens’ movement, the Vilyui Committee, had formed to gather and publish all of it: the dam, the water, the tests, the rockets. Over the following decade the diamond interest absorbed it; local chapters were filled with officials tied to that interest, and members were reminded that pressing a right to a clean environment would cost them the industry their districts live on (Crate 2002). The material the committee gathered is on record. The pits are still open.
Sakha matters to the state as a store of raw material, and the landscape carries the shape of that use. The diamond field is a sacrifice zone in the sense the geographer Mia Bennett gives the term: ground worn down again and again for economic and strategic gain, where the cut runs downward into the rock and outward to the cities that consume the product (Bennett 2016). The order behind it is what the historian Alexander Etkind calls internal colonisation, an empire governing its own interior with the instruments of overseas rule (Etkind 2011). The pits, the company towns, the waste hills and the buried fallout are what that arrangement has left standing on the ground.
