Remediation
Terraforming & Flooding
Spaces
Infrastructures
Concepts
Strategies
James is an award winning artist, filmmaker and creative practice researcher working across creative digital media, video installation, film, photography, performance and sound.
James’ creative ethnographic practice explores specific landscapes asking questions of their contemporary role, relevance and our emotive response to them. His practice seeks to investigate our complex and contradictory relationship with the natural world. His films aim to push the intersection of the visual and sonic land/ seascape. Achieved by combining multiple technologies, juxtaposing traditional film techniques and observing the world through a slow cinematic lens.
92U
Film Duration: 4 minutes 10s
Genre: Experimental Documentary
Format: Digital / Immersive Sound / Mixed Media (Satellite Imagery, IR video & Field Audio)
92U is an experimental documentary short responding to fieldwork conducted in Bad Schlema, a former spa town in Saxony’s Erzgebirgskreis district, later transformed into one of the world’s largest uranium mining operations. The film reflects on the enduring legacy of this extractive activity and the vast, remediated terrains that remain. These “heap landscapes”, formed from over 7.7 million cubic meters of uranium mining waste, are now capped, covered with mineral soil, and reforested into curated landscapes of apparent stability.
Through a blend of infrared recording, archival material, and footage from within the former mine, 92U brings these human-made environments into conversation with their past and possible futures. Infrared imagery expands our visual perception, revealing unseen contours of the reengineered land, while archival clips evoke both the intensity of past activity and the nostalgia expressed by local communities.
Ambient recordings of birds singing, leaves rustling and trees swaying are interjected with the bursts of Geiger counter recordings, pulling the viewer into a deeper awareness of the unseen presence of radiation. These sonic interruptions serve as a reminder that remediation is not erasure, and that curated nature overlays a still-active legacy. Still images from inside the mine include – abandoned tracks, corroded pipes, stagnant waters, and oxidised minerals. These linger beside the altered surfaces, exposing a layered dialogue between memory, containment, and transformation.
At once meditative and critical, 92U considers how landscapes shaped by uranium function. This site might soon be re-entered for lithium, continuing cycles of extraction beneath a surface that appears, for now, quiet.
C₁₆₆H₁₃₀O₄₉
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.