The sun burns skin
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Dates2021 - Ongoing
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Author
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Recognition
The sun burns skin, but in a couple of years it will boil blood.
Blazing blue flames wake me up. Air tastes like hot ash with a trace of sulphur. As I look through my window overlooking the city, I see in central position a bird sitting on top of one of the old blast furnaces. Down below black dotted caterpillars are eating away at leaves and trees until there’s no more air to breathe. The heat is excruciating. Glass first cracks and then melts away. The scene intoxicates me. The brightness of the hot iron blinds me. Blisters gum up my retina. Bright glowing iron crawls up my skull, flowing through my hair and down my veins. I feel as though death is close but until then I never felt so alive.
The sun burns skin is a fictional short story shot in and around former Stalinstadt. The city is dying: The youngest city in Germany was planned from scratch and solely designed around the steel mill. When Germany
was reunited, a combination of optimisation and location led to declining production and workforce. Of the former 30,000 steelworkers, only 2,000 remain. The inhabitant’s and also the city’s identity is in crisis because it was all constructed around the steel mill. It feels as though the steel flowing out of the blast furnace is both the artery that keeps the city alive and the cancer that eats it alive.
Eisenhüttenstadt’s destiny reflects what will be coming for many former Soviet cities surrounding large industrial plants. Inevitably, the switch to renewable energy and sustainable production will come, and once it does it will do so abruptly, leaving the local working class disrooted. Yet, even if we manage
to somehow turn the wheel on climate change it might already be too late to prevent catastrophe: Industrial processes are so ingrained in our identity that they seem to run through our veins like a poison we cannot live without. The young man in the series faces this uncertain future in which the world as he knows it will first crumble and then come crashing down, leaving behind an industrial wasteland.
