«Don’t Forget The Mountain» positions its viewer as an archaeologist digging through layers of the mountain’s geological and historical memories.
It features interviews conducted by Studio Pararaum with the Gipsbergwerk Schleitheim’s caretakers, analogue footage from the cave’s interior, animated renderings of the collaborative’s LiDAR scans, and re-interpretation through their fine-tuned AI models.
Viewers follow Studio Pararaum through a breakdown of rational documentation. Their images flicker intensely. The original cave breaks down. Like memory, the film becomes increasingly unstable as the viewer is guided deeper into its fleeting caverns. The viewer engages in an active process of re-memory as they mentally process the fragments presented on screen. They dig through the mountain, searching through archival material, analogue recordings, and digital scans on the hunt for an intangible memory. We reach for a precarious mine, one which can collapse, become inaccessible, disappeared and forgotten.
Biography
Led by Meng Li and Linda Zhang, Studio Pararaum experiments with hybrid processes that interweave emerging technology, affect theory, and making. Pararaum considers their practice to be a provocation of space’s capacity to communicate through felt experience—using affect as a design process towards lived experience.