PECHBLENDE is a visual reenactment of uranium's route – geopolitical, physical and chemical – from East Germany to the first Soviet atomic bomb. Driven by fragmented childhood memories of the waste "pyramids" and the iridescent toxicity of the water, it fuses apparitions and imagery derived from oral testimonies into a constant molten flow. Subterranean abstractions evoke the restless human drive to convert nature into power, ignoring the consequences it leaves for later generations to answer. 

FULL CONCEPT

On the horizon of Robert Seidel's childhood stood "pyramids" – the local name for the conical spoil heaps (Spitzkegelhalden) of Ronneburg, a small East German town near his own. They rose over a hundred metres, landmarks of an industry whose name could not be spoken. What was mined beneath them remained unknown to him, as to almost everyone else in the country: a state secret operating in plain sight. With the Peaceful Revolution the clandestine dissolved and, like the country that had kept it, the waste pyramids disappeared. What remained was hazardous debris, polychromatic water and a vast open pit, later filled with its own spoil and reopened as a federal garden park.

Initially started as part of Germany's war reparations in 1946, the Soviet-German mining company Wismut, extracted over 230,000 tonnes of uranium until 1990. Even the name was a decoy. The operation was called after bismuth, a metal it was not there to mine. By 1952 it had become the largest uranium producer in the world, and the most important foreign supplier to the Soviet nuclear weapons programme during the Cold War. Uranium ore from Seidel's home region fed the reactors that bred the plutonium for RDS-1, the first Soviet atomic bomb. It was detonated in the Kazakh steppe on 29 August 1949, ending the American nuclear monopoly and accelerating the arms race.

More than 400,000 people laboured in the Wismut mines over the years, across some 400 shafts in Thuringia and Saxony. Tens of thousands were conscripted in the earliest years. To this day, over 10,000 of those former workers have died as a result of accidents, silicosis and radiation exposure in the mines. And the toll is still rising, since these diseases surface decades after the dust and radon are inhaled.

The film takes its title from pitchblende, the black variety of uraninite, the ore from which uranium is won. It responds to the latent and radiant violence of the mineral as it bleeds through soil and water, rendering the familiar strange and the toxic beautiful: crystalline blooms, sulphurous yellows, the spectral blue-green of secondary minerals – contamination as an unwilling spectacle. On a longer timescale it follows the ore scraped from the ground, washed and pulverised in ceaseless physical and chemical transformations, until what remains is yellowcake – the intermediate powder needed for the production of the warheads.

Seidel's methods mirror these transformative processes: Gestural animated drawings, filmed miniatures and digital fragmentation are fed into self-trained AI models and fused into a constant molten flow. One epoch-defining technology employed to examine another, each an ambivalent revolution, each extraction at its disguised price. Nikolai von Sallwitz's breathtaking soundscape expands on these corrosive images, oscillating between the constant rumble of the mines, the detonations resonating through the ground, and the relentless mechanical conquest of the material.

PECHBLENDE is a visual reenactment of uranium's route – geopolitical, physical and chemical. Driven by fragmented childhood memories of the "pyramids" and the iridescent toxicity of the water, it fuses apparitions and imagery derived from oral testimonies into gleaming painterly tableaux. Historically rooted but never indexical, its residual beauty offers no consolation: it holds the buried in abstraction and traces the fascination of a species that remakes nature into something unprecedented, blind to consequences it leaves for later generations to answer. After the mines closed the landscape has been renaturalised on the surface, and the last workers are ageing away. As history recedes from public view, the waste sites beneath remain as radiant as ever...