2018, mixed-media video installation, consisting of HD video, 19’19”, color, sound, gravel pile 300 x 500 cm

staging ground observes a floating dredge on the Irelyakh, a small river in the west of the Republic of Sakha in eastern Siberia. The machine is a processing plant on a pontoon: it lifts the diamond-bearing gravel off the riverbed, sorts out the stones, and drops the rest behind it. One full swing takes about 15 minutes and leaves a curved ridge of spoil, called a crocodile on site; the ridges of earlier passes cover the valley floor. The film is one static shot without commentary, so the sound of the machine carries it. People appear only as small figures in the cabins and beside the machine. In the installation the same material returns as a pile of gravel.

The Irelyakh runs through the Mirny district in the west of the Republic of Sakha, past the town of Mirny, and joins the Ochchuguy-Botuobuya, a tributary of the Vilyui, at the settlement of Almazny. Diamonds weathered out of the region’s kimberlite rock over a long span of time and settled in the river gravel. A deposit held in loose sediment rather than in solid rock is called a placer, and it is worked from the water rather than from a pit. Geologists of the Amakinsky expedition found the first diamonds here in the summer of 1954, and a rich placer was opened the following year. It was decided to work it with dredges, on the model of the diamond placers in the Urals. Construction began in the autumn of 1958 on the right bank, where an artificial pond was dug for the first machine to float in. Three dredges work the river today, the oldest of them since 1960 (SakhaPress, January 2025).

Draga is the Russian word for a machine of this kind, and it is closer to a factory than to a boat. The newest of the three was built in Irkutsk and put into service on 20 August 2004: a displacement of 2,100 tonnes, buckets of 250 litres, a design life of 40 years, a throughput of roughly three million tonnes of sand a year, and a single computerised console from which the whole process is run (REGNUM, 2 September 2004). The plant is held on cables and pivots around a fixed post, cutting an arc, then steps forward and swings back. Everything happens inside: the bucket chain lifts, screens and separators take out the stones, and the spent gravel leaves at the stern. Isolated in the frame, the apparatus stands as a form in its own right, close to the industrial typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose 1970 book called such structures anonymous sculptures. Its shape follows from engineering and from cost.

The ridges left behind are not waste in the accounting sense. The Russian state register of mineral reserves lists them separately from the river, as dredge tailings with their own volume and their own grade: 626,000 cubic metres in the proven categories at 0.341 carats per cubic metre, and a further 5.46 million cubic metres in the lower category (State Balance of Mineral Reserves of the Russian Federation, 1 January 2020, volume 32, Diamonds). The two older machines have passed over the same ground three times, treating what the earlier passes left as a fresh deposit; a deposit made out of mining waste is called technogenic (Mirninsky Rabochy, August 2024). What the dredges cut into the valley is therefore held twice: as a shape in the ground, and as a booked quantity with a carat value.

Before the 1950s roughly 98 per cent of the world’s diamond extraction sat in the Congo and South Africa, and the Soviet Union bought the stones it needed for tools and machining on a market it did not control. Finding a domestic supply became a state priority, and the search was run from the centre: decisions about the new industry, and about the settlements built for it, were taken by institutes under the Ministry of Non-Ferrous Metallurgy in Moscow, more than 4,000 kilometres away (Kalemeneva, The Thaw in the Arctic, Urban History 52, 2025). The first kimberlite pipes of the region were found in 1954 and 1955, and the settlement at the mouth of the Irelyakh carries the search in its own sequence of names: it was called Irelyakh first, then Drazhny, the dredge settlement, and from December 1962 Almazny, after almaz, the Russian word for diamond.

Twenty kilometres upstream of Almazny, at Mirny, the same diamond field is taken out of solid rock instead of gravel. A pit more than a kilometre across and around 500 metres deep sits directly against the housing blocks; surface mining there ended in 2001, the underground mine beneath it has been out of production since a flood in 2017, and a decision on a new mine at greater depth is pending. On the river the dredges keep working. They belong to ALROSA, the state owned company that accounts for more than 90 per cent of Russian diamond production, and since 1 January 2024 the European Union has banned imports of Russian diamonds as part of a coordinated G7 measure (Council of the European Union, twelfth sanctions package, 18 December 2023).