Filmvisninger av Mia Yu

Image caption Eme Cosmos - Mia Yu- Single channel film. 4K. Color. Duration 23:30 min. Stereo sound. 2024. Courtesy of the artist. (permitted for online use) Title and abstract of the talk Imagining Asia’s Largest Open-Pit Mine as a Geo-Cosmic Myth by Mia Yu Coined by geologist Dorothy Vitaliano, geomyth refers to traditional narratives rooted in observations of real geological phenomena through which ancient cultures interpreted the earth’s deep time. Today, large-scale extractive sites function as human-made geological events, reshaping the Earth’s crust and altering planetary rhythms. Drawing on her experimental documentaries Eme Cosmos (2024–2025) and Amber (2024)—both filmed at Asia’s largest open-pit mine—Mia Yu asks how such mega-extractive landscapes might generate new geomyths for the future. For her, these sites are not merely industrial zones, but archives of erased histories and latent myths. Mia Yu’s talk frames geomyth as a critical method for rethinking infrastructure and explores how critical mythmaking may act as a “soft technology” for imagining post-extractive futures. Bionote Mia Yu is an artist, art historian, and curator working between Beijing and Paris. Her practice is built on long-term field research at large-scale infrastructures and extractive sites, and examines the complex relationships between post-extractive nature, cosmology, and geopolitics in the Asian context. She has exhibited and screened her works at institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Palais des Beaux Arts Paris, Photografiska, Goethe-Institut, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Times Museum Berlin, Villa Vassilieff, CAFA Art Museum, and Kunstverein Hamburg. Mia Yu has taught at China Art Academy and is currently a visiting researcher at the École normale supérieure in Paris. Film synopsis Mia Yu. Single channel film. / 4K. Color. / Duration: 23:30 min. / Stereo sound. Born from the ancestral myths of the Changbai-Paektu Mountain range, Goddess Eme is venerated as a sacred spirit whose reclining body nurtures all living things—a cosmos where creatures and ecosystems coexist in symbiosis. Yet over the past century, this once-vital legend has faded into near oblivion. On a snowbound winter day, two story- collectors set out on a journey to revive Eme’s forgotten myth. Their path cuts through Eme Cosmos, 2024–2025 colossal mining pits, slag heaps, garbage incinerators, and massive energy installations: each stratum of industrial debris bears witness to deep ecological grief. As they unearth the landscape’s wounded history, the spirit of Eme rises, bearing witness to her earthly trauma. Filmed at the largest open-pit mine in Asia, Eme Cosmos interweaves myth, historical archives, and performative gestures with sweeping drone cinematography. The film seeks to unleash the therapeutic force of storytelling and reimagines “energy” as an ethics of care, compassion, and trans-corporeal resonance. Amber, 2024 Mia Yu. Single channel film. / 4K. Color. / Duration: 9:10 min. / Stereo sound. Amber is set in a convenience store beside a gigantic open-pit coal mine in northeastern China. Decades of intensive mining have caused the surrounding land to sink, leaving the region geologically unstable. With no access to affordable fuel, the store owner fears surviving the harsh winter. As neighbors have been moving away, they leave behind piles of discarded clothing, which the owner burns in the furnace to heat the store. One snowy winter day, a group of retired miners gathers around the furnace to recall the past. Their most cherished memory is of searching for amber in the mine—a rare, fleeting moment of beauty amid the industrial grime. As they chat, a Peking Drum Opera plays on the television, declaring: “... rearrange the mountains and waters for a renewal of life.” This event is organized by Sarah Huang Chen for the research project Creative Agency and Environmental Humanities at Oslo Center for Environmental Humanities in collaboration with the research projects An Ecological History of Eurasian Art and Amber Worlds as well as the research group Creative practice – (trans)forming space, place and the environment