Supplement 2: exclusion zones

The second issue in Fillip’s Supplement series unpacks Susanne Kriemann’s photographic investigation of uraninite (or pitchblende), a radioactive, uranium-rich mineral found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (where it was mined for the Manhattan Project), Canada (in the Athabasca Basin and Great Bear Lake), and throughout Europe. Kriemann’s work focuses on the impact of the land surrounding uraninite mines operated by the the now defunct mining company SDAG Wismut in the Ore Mountains of the former GDR. In Kriemann’s work, radioactive pigments drawn from wild plants growing near the vast sludge ponds at the decommissioned mine become raw photographic material: toxic, volatile, and beautiful.

Documented through Kriemann’s photographs, archival images, and a new text by Eva Wilson, Exclusion Zones charts an economic–geologic–cosmic nexus that speaks to the diverse impacts of industrial resource extraction and environmental remediation

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