2023, mixed-media video installation, three screens, three videos (Screen 1: 37’38”, Screen 2: 37’38”, Screen 3: 09’10”), color, sound, ventilation tube, omnidirectional spotlight

the cavity on the inside is a three-screen video installation filmed underground in the Röhrig shaft at Wettelrode, a former copper mine in the Mansfeld-Südharz district and a visitor mine since 1991. Between rusted rails and rotting timber, water drips from the rock and leaves crusts of lime and copper minerals on every surface it touches. Animated 3D scans of rock and slag lumps from the region are set into these workings, and slow changes are run at speed: hardening sediment, brown and red oxidation, growing mineral skin. The geological processes are speculatively crossed with the metallurgy of copper smelting.

Alexander Klose, co-curator with Daniel Herrmann of the Werkleitz Festival 2023 Mein Schatz [My Precious], written for the exhibition at the Novalis Museum, Schloss Oberwiederstedt, on the three-screen installation.

Who says that minerals are dead rocks? The categorical distinction of Western thinking between living, active matter and “inanimate,” supposedly passive matter forms the prerequisite for exploiting mineral resources without restraint. This is what anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli says, who has explored intensively the conflicts between colonial legislation on land use rights and the views of nature held by indigenous populations. But even in Western thought itself – for example, in the romantic natural philosophy of a Novalis – one finds ideas that oppose the sole dominance of economic calculation and scientific rationalism. The German artist Viktor Brim, born in Uzbekistan, focuses on the activity of rocks. He is interested in both the circumstances of their extraction and the dynamics in which they themselves are embedded and which are triggered by them, from geology to economics to politics. For My Precious, he developed the multi-channel video work the cavity on the inside. It is based on animated 3D scans of rock and slag lumps he found in former mines and heaps in the Mansfeld region. The videos document and simulate various flow states and structure formation processes of rocks. Natural processes such as oxidation, sintering and ore mineralization, which can take thousands or even millions of years, are accelerated and speculatively crossed with metallurgical processes from the smelting industry to explore agencies and geological ranges.

The Röhrig shaft at Wettelrode, north of Sangerhausen, is a former copper mine that has been open as a visitor mine since 1991. Sinking began in 1871 and reached a final depth of 295 meters. Its steel headframe dates from 1888 and is the oldest of its kind still in service in Germany. The shaft served the Sangerhausen pit as a ventilation shaft, and guided tours now go down to around 283 meters. At that depth the workings hold a stretch the guides call the Green Vault, after the treasure chamber in Dresden. The walls there carry a coat of colors that run into one another, strong browns, then white, green, turquoise, blue and black. The color comes from minerals that seeping water has taken out of the surrounding rock and set down again on the surface. The water has not stopped. It runs from the roof, stands between the rails and keeps the floor wet, so the coat is still being added to while visitors walk past it.

The seam that made this region is the Kupferschiefer, a black shale some 30 to 40 centimeters thick, laid down on the floor of an enclosed sea and dated to 257.3 million years (Brauns et al., 2003). By tradition the first shafts were sunk near Hettstedt around 1199 by two miners from Goslar. In 1571 the Mansfeld district counted 127 shafts and 1494 miners, and by 1913 more than 22,000 people worked in its mines and smelting works. Because the seam is thin, the working face stayed under 50 centimeters and the ore was cut lying on one side. The balance for the Mansfeld and Sangerhausen districts, from about 1200 to 1990, is 109 million tons of ore, 2.63 million tons of copper and 14,213 tons of silver (Knitzschke and Spilker, 2003). Mining stopped on 30 September 1990. Everything in the district stands downstream of that thin layer: the towns, the smelting sites, the heaps, the shafts and the museum that now runs tours through one of them.

On the floor of the old workings at Wettelrode, mineral crust grows over everything that was left behind. Sinter is the name for it: water moves through the rock, takes up lime and metal salts, and drops them again where it seeps out or evaporates. It closes over wooden props and offcuts of timber, runs along the rails and over loose iron, and builds small round beads, cave pearls, in the shallow pools. Where the crust is thin the wood grain and the rust still show through. Where it is thick the object underneath is gone and only a lumpy white or ochre shape is left, and a single piece of timber can take years to be covered in this way. Organic and non-organic matter work here on very different clocks. Mold spreads over damp wood in days, the crust thickens over years and decades, the rock around it holds a far longer measure, and all three sit in one frame.

The Röhrig shaft sits inside the South Harz karst landscape, a biosphere reserve whose ground is built from the gypsum and sulfate rocks of the Zechstein. Karst is rock that water dissolves, so the surface fills with holes: sinkholes, caves, dry valleys and salt springs, all of them made by water carrying rock away. Mining added its own holes to the same ground, and the two are of a comparable order. Below the drainage adit in the Mansfeld basin, the workings cut by hand and machine come to 44 million cubic meters, while the cavities dissolved out of the soluble rock are put at around 170 million (Knitzschke and Spilker, 2003). Around 1300 shafts run through the region, and beside them stand the cone-shaped heaps of the rock that came out. When the pumps were shut down in 1970 and the water rose again, the ground answered: in one subsidence basin at Eisleben the surface sank by more than a meter a year from 1975.

The processes that shape the surfaces in these videos are run at speed. Diagenesis is the slow hardening of loose sediment into solid rock. Oxidation is the reaction with air and water that stains formations brown and red. Sintering is the pressing together of grains under the weight of the mass above, which raises their density while minerals form in the layers directly over and under. Each of them leaves a form on the rock, and each is compressed here from thousands or millions of years into minutes. They are then crossed with the metallurgy that emptied the region. In copper smelting, carbon is added at high temperature and pulls the oxygen and sulfur off the metal, while iron collects in the slag. On screen the scanned lumps rest in a black space with no horizon, sometimes alone, sometimes two side by side, one bleached white with lime, the other stained red and brown. Making, decaying and re-forming are not held apart but run into one another.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari take metallurgy as their main case for a life that belongs to matter itself, rather than a shape pressed onto it from outside. Their smith does not force a form on dead metal. The smith follows a material that keeps changing as it is heated, poured and cooled, a matter of continuous variation that never settles into one final form. Metallurgy on this reading is thinking that follows the flow of matter instead of fixing it, and from it the two authors draw the idea of a nonorganic life, a liveliness that is not biological but is present in the mineral all the same. Reduction in the furnace, oxidation on an open surface and sintering under load are changes of exactly this kind, where the material and its transformation keep overspilling any settled form. Run at speed, a lump of rock reads as a stage in that flow and not as an end of it.

Jane Bennett gives a chapter of Vibrant Matter to the question of whether metal is inert, and her answer starts with its structure. Metal is polycrystalline: it consists of many tiny crystals packed together, each with curved faces because its neighbors got in the way of its growth. At the boundaries sit loose atoms that belong to none of the grains, so the edges stay porous and quivering, and the whole is shot through with gaps that metallurgists exploit with heat when they make an alloy. Bennett reads that quivering as a liveliness of the material itself. She adds that metal is never metal alone but always an alloy of many efforts, worked on by geological, biological and human hands at once. In the flooded workings the crust, the corroding rail and the mold on the timber are at work on the same surfaces. Her borrowed phrase for what follows, from the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, is that we are walking, talking minerals.

the cavity on the inside was commissioned by Werkleitz for the Werkleitz Festival 2023 Mein Schatz [My Precious], one of eight works made new for that edition, and co-produced with the Digitales Koproduktionslabor in Dortmund, funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia. The festival ran from 2 to 18 June 2023 in the granary and the inspector’s house at the Novalis Museum, Schloss Oberwiederstedt, in the Mansfeld-Südharz district, and was curated by Daniel Herrmann and Alexander Klose. It took its title from Tolkien and asked what counts as treasure in a mining region three decades after the mines closed: the ring of power could today be a smartphone, and the residues left in the heaps still hold gold, silver, copper, nickel, cobalt and platinum, the metals a phone is built from. Novalis was born on the estate and worked as Friedrich von Hardenberg for the Saxon mining administration, opening new extraction areas, while as a poet he imagined a nature that resists being reduced to economic calculation. The three screens stand in a vaulted brick cellar, with a ventilation tube coiled on the floor and a single omnidirectional spotlight above.