I am a miner's son - Michał Soja & Róża Duda

Michał Soja and Róża Duda studied art and media art in Krakow, Munich, Vienna and Zurich. They have been working together since 2016, primarily in experimental film, mixing forms of new media, 3d animation, video or installation. In their shared practise, they often deal with notions of collective memory, analyse of contemporary visual culture, and refer to longterm implications of capitalism for modern subjectivity. In their award-winning documentary project Gold Mine (2016), they combine documentary film footage with computer-generated objects, creating an archaeological reconstruction of contemporaneity. Similarly, I am a miner’s son juxtaposes recordings of a flooded mine in southwestern Poland with images from an abandoned hotel in Greece and animated material, touching on new identities emerging in a globalised world and local reactions to a pandemic crisis. If the miner was a central element of technological, capitalist development, generating profit on the surface by extracting resources from underground, who then is his son? He is a product of a radically new consciousness. Like Frankenstein's monster, sewn together from pieces of history and cultural codes, he is thrown into the middle of an empty, post-apocalyptic landscape.