THE SUN THAT FELL INTO THE WATER begins twice. The first beginning, narrated by a machine generated voice out of breath, tells of the enduring search for, and the impossibility of, a perpetual motion machine. The second, narrated by a child, tells of the construction of a hydropower plant in Maribor, present-day Slovenia, that began under German occupation as part of imperial militarisation run on forced labour. The power plant was completed in Yugoslavia and is still operational today.
Machine, a mechanism that performs work, or motion, shape shifts energy. A perpetual motion machine is an image of lossless automation, of energy converted to work in a cyclic process without an outside energy source or exhaustion, an end in sight. Any such mechanism proposed is impossible, revealed as either a staged scam or a theoretical construct in conflict with the laws of thermodynamics, observed to describe the physical world. Any model of a perpetual motion machine eventually comes to a standstill, or in fact sources its energy from the outside.
Stitching the narrative, I was thinking of the water, the land and the landscape as protagonists, the backdrop that comes to reclaim the view.
The hydropower plant tells of a scheme to increase domestic energy supply based on a principle of the consumable outside – the labour of a foreign, disposable workforce, and the expansion towards the continued extraction of resources on occupied land. A hydropower plant is an attempt at regulation of water, a force and a system that builds and disintegrates habitable land. The energy of the movement of water, put to work to sustain the war, later constituted industrialisation under a model of workers’ self-management in Yugoslavia. It now hosts a computing and data centre, together with the contemporary vision of increased computational capacity mobilised to model, monitor and manage the complex systems outside the human scale. Meanwhile, the large-scale floods that recently took hold of the region, a symptom of unfolding climate change, are predicted to occur with increased frequency in the future.
Stitching the narrative, I was thinking of the water, the land and the landscape as protagonists, the backdrop that comes to reclaim the view. What is sustained when infrastructure built to fuel militarisation of fascist occupation is continuous with the present?
