Tales of Speculative Energies: Mythmaking as Eco-Cosmotecnics (Canadian Premiere)

 

 

For the past three years, artist and curator Mia Yu has been researching about China’s disrupted landscape of fossil fuel extraction and its complex histories. She is currently developing a multifaceted project titled “Tales of Speculative Energies”, which questions what energy means in an era of climate change and energy transition. Her two recent films Eme Cosmos (2024) and Amber (2024) narrate planetary stories about Fushun, the largest coal mine in Asia. In this lecture and Canadian premiere screening of these two films, Mia Yu will talk about how she engages mythmaking as an aesthetic approach of eco-cosmotecnics in order to conceive of energy as an ethics of care and resonance rather than merely a material resource to exploit.

 

 

Shot on the largest open-pit mine in Asia, Mia Yu’s film Eme Cosmos (2024) tells a mythic story that haunts the landscape of fossil fuel extraction in Northeast China today. By integrating mythology with documentary and archive, the film unleashes the therapeutic power to the disturbed land and imagine “energy” as an ethics of care and resonance.

 

Amber (2024) is a short film about the winter life in a convenience store adjacent to a colossal open pit coal mine. As the store owner burns clothes to keep the store warm, the miners gather here to reminisce about their youth. Their most cherished memory involves searching for amber among the coal.

 

 

Mia Yu is an artist, curator and researcher based in Beijing. Her current work emerges from researching the socio-ecological predicament posed by fossil fuel extraction and developing new aesthetic approaches to envision post-carbon futures. As a curator, Mia Yu has curated exhibitions and projects at Goethe Institut, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, OCAT Biennale, Arles International Photo Festival, Pro Helvetia, Times Museum, and Inside-Out Museum. Her films have been widely exhibited at art institutions around the world. Mia Yu was the winner of the Yishu Critical Writing Award in 2018  and the winner of China Contemporary Art Awards (now the Sigg Art Prize) in 2015.