Site specific intervention at the Statsberget Cave
Single screen, Video, 13 minutes
Extracts from a Future History | Lulea



A walk in ten scenes:
Scene 1: The Blood of Stars
Scene 2: The Clearing Where a Star Fell and Lay Bleeding
Scene 3: The Scatter of Sleepwalking Iron
Scene 4: The Place Where Cave Paintings Were Rehearsed
Scene 5: The Light That Searches for Fungi that Eat Meteorite
Scene 6: A Room That is Incredibly Close and Extremely Far
Scene 7: The Orbit of an Eye
Scene 8: The Flow of Contagious Crimson Life
Scene 9: The Time is Never Right
Scene 10: The Offering That Never Ends

While thinking about and making “The Blood of Stars”, we were interested in how a substance like iron, which is in our blood, under the ground, and is ejected from the debris of dying stars becomes a marker of time, as in the ‘Iron Age’ and a key substance in the formation of implements for everything from agriculture to war.
Our research took us to a working iron mine, which produces some of the purest iron ore in the world, deep inside the Arctic Circle, in Northern Sweden. We learnt about how energy for the mine leads to a damming of rivers, creating obstructions in the path of nomadic reindeer herds. The reindeers on the earth, like the reindeer in the sky, lose their way.
During the making of this work, first exhibited as an immersive installation inside an abandoned military base in a cave system inside a mountain, we were able to obtain footage of a year’s worth of the sky with the northern lights over Sweden from an astronomical observatory and also handle and situate a fragment of an iron laden meteorite that is actually half a billion years older than the earth itself.
A curiosity about space, or about the deep oceans, or the interior of the earth, expands our ways of thinking. It wrests it free from narrow, sectarian and nationalist boxes, and provide a more capacious frame within which to think questions that have deep political and ethical implications.
(email us on studio@raqsmediacollective.net to request access)