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Since 2014, the artist and Professor of artistic photography Susanne Kriemann has been pursuing extensive research into pitchblende mining in the Erzgebirge (Ore) mountains, which was used by the GDR to extract uranium, with various photographic works and installations. The eponymous Gessenwiese and Kanigsberg are part of a landscape that has been in constant change since 1946. The overburden from the mining industry created radioactive spoil heaps and lakes that are being rehabilitated by various means: plants growing on Gessenwiese accumulate contaminants from the soil. Textiles are used to slowly dry out the lakes and bind the radioactive dust. The banked mounds are returned to the earth bit by bit.

These continual changes to the volumes in the landscape and their afterlife are the conceptual starting point for G(essenwiese) K(anigsberg). In recent years, Susanne Kriemann has developed a radically expanded idea of photography that investigates new systems for registering events and geological periods. This book is Kriemann’s second work, after P(ech) B(lende) (2016), for her Library for Radioactive Afterlife, a growing conceptual ‘library’ on the radioactive afterlife of events.