Know Your Stones

A stone quarry in Hagen, the Thyssenkrupp steelworks in Duisburg-Bruckhausen, the Ruhr University Bochum – Katarina Jazbec has selected all these places as environments for her new film project. The artist is thus transferring her interest in rituals of dream-sharing, the act of expressing, and communicating dreams to the Ruhr Area. In her film, she examines how processes of transformation in the former mining region impact the nocturnal dreams of people living there. How is their relationship with nature reflected in those dreams, and what stories are hidden in them? What significance does the end of the fossil fuel age carry for the region’s possible future?

In her works, which are based on long-term participatory research processes, Katarina Jazbec (b. 1991 in Slovenia, based in the Netherlands) creates new narrative forms, through which she explores vulnerability and agency of human and nature in the current economic system. Her work proposes various potentialities to imagine, embody and reflect upon living together in an increasingly divided world. In her award-winning experimental documentary You Can’t Automate Me (2021) she for instance hauntingly portrays the dangerous working life of Rotterdam dockworkers, who risk their lives on a daily basis securing shipping containers. The artist’s most recent film, created specially for Ruhr Ding: Schlaf, magnifies such risks to examine the dangers faced by humanity as a whole. What does the peril of climate change have in store for the future of Homo sapiens?

Katarina Jazbec’s film production for Ruhr Ding: Schlaf is supported by the Mondriaan Fonds (The Netherlands).