We will screen Mia Yu’s experimental documentaries Eme Cosmos (2024–2025) and Amber (2024) in the presence of the artist, who will talk about her research on the largest open-pit mine in Asia asking how mega-extractive landscapes might generate new geomyths for the future. The screening is followed by a Q&A session chaired by Alexandra Toland (OsloMet).
*Free admission - no registration required.
Eme Cosmos
Single channel film. / 4K. Color. / Duration: 23:30 min. / Stereo sound.
Born from the ancestral myths of the Changbai Paektu Mountain range, Goddess Eme is venerated as a sacred spirit whose reclining body nurtures all living things—a cosmos where creatures and ecosystems coexist in symbiosis. Yet over the past century, this once vital legend has faded into near oblivion. On a snowbound winter day, two story-collectors set out on a journey to revive Eme’s forgotten myth. Their path cuts through colossal mining pits, slag heaps, garbage incinerators, and massive energy installations: each stratum of industrial debris bears witness to deep ecological grief. As they unearth the landscape’s wounded history, the spirit of Eme rises, bearing witness to her earthly trauma. Filmed at the largest open pit mine in Asia, Eme Cosmos interweaves myth, historical archives, and performative gestures with sweeping drone cinematography. The film seeks to unleash the therapeutic force of storytelling, and reimagines “energy” as an ethics of care, compassion, and trans corporeal resonance.
Amber
Single channel film. / 4K. Color. / Duration: 9:10 min. / Stereo sound.
Amber is set in a convenience store beside a gigantic open-pit coal mine in northeastern China. Decades of intensive mining have caused the surrounding land to sink, leaving the region geologically unstable. With no access to affordable fuel, the store owner fears surviving the harsh winter. As neighbors have been moving away, they leave behind piles of discarded clothing, which the owner burns in the furnace to heat the store. One snowy winter day, a group of retired miners gathers around the furnace to recall the past. Their most cherished memory is of searching for amber in the mine—a rare, fleeting moment of beauty amid the industrial grime. As they chat, a Peking Drum Opera plays on the television, declaring: “......rearrange the mountains and waters for a renewal of life.”
About the artist
Mia Yu is an artist, art historian, and independent curator working between Paris and Beijing. Her practice is built on long-term field research at large-scale infrastructures and extractive sites, and examines the complex relationships between post-extractive nature, cosmology, and geopolitics in the Asian context. Her works have been exhibited and screened at the Centre Pompidou, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Kunstverein Hamburg, Photografiska, the Goethe-Institut, Times Museum, Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival, European Media Art Festival and Serendipity Arts Festival. Her writings have appeared in Artforum, Oxford Art Review, Art Monthly, and the Afterall Exhibition Histories book series. Mia Yu has taught at the China Art Academy and is currently a visiting researcher at the École normale supérieure in Paris.
Collaborators
This event is organized by Sarah Chen Huang (ECOART) for the research projects Creative Agency and Environmental Humanities at Oslo Center for Environmental Humanities and Amber Worlds, in collaboration with the research projects An Ecological History of Eurasian Art and the research group Creative practice – (trans)forming space, place and the environment.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. This event is supported by ERC grants (ERC, ECOART, 101124354, and ERC, AMBER, 101075511).
