Film Duration: 8 minutes 15s
Genre: Experimental Documentary
Format: Digital / Immersive Sound / Mixed Media (Satellite Imagery, IR video & Field Audio)
C₁₆₆H₁₃₀O₄₉ is a meditative, non-narrative exploration of a transformed landscape, Großräschen See (formerly Ilse-See), a flooded lignite mine turned artificial lake. Through abstract satellite imagery submerged beneath the lake’s surface, the film delves into the layered entanglement of human intervention and non-human presence. These images are set against a composed soundscape made from textured field recordings.
The lake footage is captured using infrared recording technology, revealing visual registers normally hidden from human sight. Expanding perception and opening new ways of sensing this submerged world.
Low, echoing resonance from the pier, once part of an industrial excavator, now a pedestrian bridge, vibrates with deep metallic groans. The creaks and shudders of a jetty responding, almost involuntarily, to the slow violence of the space, groaning under the weight of memory and time. These groans fluctuating with the movement of the body of water.
In the midst of this sonic register, the lake’s inhabitants speak in subtler tones: the gentle release of gas from swim bladders, rising like ghostly exhalations toward the surface.
A new ecology has emerged in the aftermath of extraction. One that is tentative, uneasy, alive.