The sun that fell into the water

The two-channel video installation imagines human presence at the intersection of the intimate, the mechanical and the political. An entry point and a case study is the story of a hydropower plant, narrated by a child. To fuel the war, Nazi Germany set to expand energy infrastructure in the territories annexed and occupied. The construction of the plant at the Maribor River Island, present-day Slovenia, began under the occupation regime and was completed in 1960, in Yugoslavia. It has been operational ever since.
The plant will now power an AI factory, a high-performance computing and data centre currently in construction, with some of the river sidetracked as cooling water for the centre. Its proposed application is to monitor the waters of the world, presented in the aftermath of extensive floods in the region.
The sun that fell into the water is partly recorded with thermal camera, infrared vision that prioritises heat over visible light. It is vision that maps presence that lingers, blurs the line between inside and out, between the living and non-living, revealing something of the world heating up.

Lena Kocutar is an artist and filmmaker born in Maribor, Slovenia, and based in Berlin. Her work revolves around technology as a social imaginary and a set of material instruments that frame visions of the world. Reading the landscape, sites of extraction, production and dissemination often make for an entry to her practice. She holds an MFA from the lens-based class at Berlin University of the Arts.

Director Lena Kocutar. Screenplay Lena Kocutar. Cinematography Lena Kocutar. Editing Lena Kocutar. Music Moritz Löwe. Sound Design Moritz Löwe. Animation Lena Kocutar. Producer Lena Kocutar. Production company Lena Kocutar (Berlin, Germany). With Pilar Petropoulos-White, Ivana Kocutar.

Films: 2024: 600 meters above sea level, Fire (8189 Images). 2026: The sun that fell into the water.