Duskdust

Duskdust is an artist book and a series of monographs by Susanne Kriemann, which takes as its starting point the former industrial site of limestone mining at Furilden peninsula on the northeastern coast of Gotland, Sweden’s biggest island. It is informed by the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with photography, labor, and archeology. The book includes photographs taken during her residencies and site visits, archival material as well as text contributions by invited authors. Writer Kirsty Bell traveled to Gotland to follow the artist’s research trails while media theorist Jussi Parikka situates Kriemann’s artistic approach within current discourse on geology and media. Maria Barnas wrote a poem based on Kriemann’s walk through a tunnel at the industrial site. Livia Paldi, director of BAC – Baltic Art Center in Visby, Sweden gives an introduction to The Site Residency program and the specificities of selected sites in relationship to Kriemann’s work.

Later, Susanne Kriemann produced in collaboration with Berlin based silkscreen studio Zwölf an assembly of 22 monographic sillscreen prints. A mountain seen both at dawn and at dusk, rises sublimely in the centre of the image. In fact, the images depict a vast pile of rubble: a heap of limestone, extracted from the ground with the purpose of becoming cement, yet left indefinitely after the closure of a mining company — now no longer a mountain, nor yet a building. The silkscreen images have been made using dust ground from limestone rocks taken off that very spoil and printed onto rock paper: the ‘mountain’ they depict both materially present in the final images and eroded through the process of their manufacture.