A
Ancient Stone, My Sweet Frontier. On Mapping a Sacrifice Zone.
Navn
Christoffer Gert Nielsen
Uddannelsesgrad
Kandidat
Fagfelt
Arkitektur
Institut
Arkitektur, By og Landskab
Program
Arkitektur og Landskab
År
2026
Udmærkelser
VOLA
Mapping an extraction landscape as a Sacrifice Zone in the Romanian Apuseni Mountains, the project explores consequences of copper extraction on ecology, ancestral lands and local praxises. Deploying tools of performance, animation, filmmaking and material research, the project proposes a method by which archiving and cartography can mediate an aesthetic resonance with crippled landscapes and industrial exploitation.
It engages how the mapping of a landscape can materialise in the shaping of objects and materials, serving as a method of representation and animation of certain processes and phenomena.
Amid the shift to green energy and a changing geopolitical reality, mining landscapes are undergoing significant changes. Globally mining activities are opening and expanding to supply the production of solar cells, nuclear power, quantum computers, data centers and military technologies. In a tense geopolitical context, this also sparks a race for raw minerals. Here, the EU, through it’s Critical Raw Material Act (CRMA), aims for increased mineral independence from other state actors. An expansion of mining activities often with substantial local consequences.
Material Witnesses
Thumbnail
Ancient Stone, My Sweet Frontier. A film made out of footage from the area. 9:36 min
As a concentrated example of the local consequences of these complicated global infrastructures, lies Valea Şesei on the periphery of the EU.
Located in the Apuseni Mountains, Romania, the Valley is flooded with mining waste from the nearby copper mine, Roșia Poieni, Europe’s second largest copper deposit. Beneath the still-expanding tailings lake, lies the buried village of Geamăna. A few inhabitants still reside in settlements on the tailings edge.
Through the relation between Mapping, Archiving and Animation, the project engages in Speculative Cartography. Here, the landscape of Valea Şesei, a zone sacrificed for the purpose of extraction, is documented and conveyed.
Cartography, Geamăna and Valea Șesei. 1:10 000. 1700x1000mm
/ Sacrifice Zone : A term that — together with Collateral Damage and Principle of Proportionality - originates from war rhetorics, describing consequences of conflict, including violence against more-than-human actors and landscapes. Violence justified by a 'greater good' - economics, geopolitics, etc - sacrificing certain areas in favor of a specific discourse and value system.
Sacrifice Zones are often located on the periphery, outside urban contexts — it is conflict-ridden border zones, frontiers marked by extractivism, colonization, and the marginalization of minority communities, indigenous cultures, and ecosystems. They are places and entities, human and more-than-human, with no rights or voice of their own.
The Mapping of Valea Şesei works between three levels: Field, Archive and Animation.
The levels are linked together by a Performance Score. It is a set of notations or instructions that guide one's approach to a landscape: first through intuition, then through categorization and analysis, and finally through organization and intervention.
In the friction between documentary and fiction the project’s methodology uses the potentials in story telling and narration of the non-heard voices left behind in a landscape of extraction. Here it produces a set of archival methods for the Animation of a landscape in destruction.
The Archives produced include documentation and mappings of relational processes and phenomena of the complex chemical, biological, geological and cultural interactions of the Valley.
Historically, the culture, industry and ecology of the Apuseni have been bound to its mineral undergrounds. A geo-chemical hotspot. The area around Valea Șesei has since the Roman Empire been transformed by mineral extraction industries. The neighbouring village of Roșia Montana has been a center of Gold extraction for the Empires of Central Europe.
Today the area around Roșia Montana is an UNESCO World Heritage site, now proposing a different value for its cultural landscape than its underground gold reserves.
Valea Șesei, Roșia Poieni and Geamănă
Essential for the project is considering the geological, industrial and cultural weavings through deep time scales: from the Alpine Orogeny to the CRMA.
Vertical and Circular Timelines have been a tool for exploring the landscape as a complex archive. A landscape that archives in different levels and scales. Through sedimentation, composting and chemical reactions. Some are preserved or conserved, some leave traces, while others dissolve and disappear.
"Material witnesses are non-human entities and machinic ecologies that archive their complex interactions with the world, producing ontological transformations and informatic dispositions that can be forensically decoded and reassembled back into a history."
- Susan Schuppli
Looking at the landscape as an archive, the project researches Characters and Material Witnesses of the landscape as potential indicators of the current material state of the Valley. The Characters become human and more-than-human indicators of the valley’s ecology, geology, and cultural states.
Examples of these Material Witnesses are the cultural heritage of Geamăna and Sașa; bees and other bio-indicators, water bodies and local farming praxises. Witnesses revealing, for example, accumulation of heavy metals in bio-bodies or the loss of local farmers and care-takers.
Characters and Witnesses are translated into a line of objects that map and diagram the relational forces of the landscape as a mean of narration; engages and translates processes and phenomena of the valley into new Material Witnesses.
Archives collected throughout the project materialize into the following objects: a Weaving of Copper and lichen, a Ceramic Bog Body, a Composite Pole with seven artefacts inserted, a Pyrite and Aluminium Font, alongside six wood-cut Icons.
Collection of Animated Material Witnesses
Material Witnesses
/ Weaving : Based on motifs of traditional wicker baskets and local hay stacks, re-working the high-tech copper and local sourced lichen.
/ Bog Body : A further translation of the wicker and haystack motif. A ceramic Bog Body of the deep tailings, its materiality is developed from the lake’s material composition. For example, it is glazed with sludge from the Tailings Bassin.
/ Pyrite Font : Staging the oxidizing pyrite: a mineral you can buy in health stores and is believed to stimulate vitality, motivation and courage, as well as protect against negative energies. - Here in the landscape, pyrite oxidizes to sulphuric acid and poisons the ecosystem.
/ Icons : A translation of nocturnal animals captured on wild life cameras. Fleeting witnesses around Valea Şesei, revealing a living mountain. The icon references a cultural praxis, where Madonna Icons - as immortalized versions of the Virgin Mary - hang on sanctuaries and life-giving places: e.g. springs in the forest or in churches and monasteries.
Here the nocturnal animals from the forest are iconized.
Icons, Nocturnal Animals. Valea Șesei, 2026. Oak, 300x168
Icons, Nocturnal Animals. Valea Șesei, 2026. Walnut, 300x168
Material Witnesses, Bog Body and Pyrite Font
/ Pole / Artefacts : Translation of the Vertical Timeline. Its components consider how new Artefacts are formed in the Tailings Bassin through pressure, reduction and time. Each Artefact referring to a contemporary state.
It consist of seven Artefacts, representing different layers of the Tailings: a beeswax and salt crystallization artefact referencing near-surface processes; an unglazed reduction-fired Artefact as near subsurface reactions; four glazed reduction-fired Artefacts referencing deeper subsurface, oxygen-depleted chemical reactions; and a bronze-cast of copper, aluminium and zink, patinated with sulphur, as a deep future Artefact of the tailings.
The Pole refers to the Kopjafa, a local cultural memorial for persons, places and events. Each section representing a distinct feature of what is remembered.
Bog Body, 2026. Ceramic, Sludge from Tailings Lake. 600x300
Copper Weaving, 2026. 700x400
The method and the production of objects, archives and film has been a medium for engaging and conveying a complex landscape and its material states. Through articulations of translation and synthesis it conveys a relation and resonance with far away landscapes. Landscapes that we, through vast networks of production and planetary urbanisations, already are infiltrated in, but bodily disconnected from.
I experience the animation of the landscape to be happening in-between documentary and fiction, as a key to narration and speculation. A narrative of a place in friction. Of voices left behind in our Anthropocene landscapes.
Wooden Pole, Clay Reduction and Salt Artefacts, 2000x100
Photos of the Landscape, February 2026
Sterile Pulp discharge
Roșia Poieni
Geamăna Tailings Lake
Sterile Pulp Discharge
Geamăna Church
Haystack and Grass Fields
Shrine
Stone Circle, Valea Şesei
Stone Circle, Olt River
Stone Circle, Quarry
Stone Circle, Horezu
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