Starting at Fensfeltet in Telemark, Norway, this essayistic art film cuts between drone footage of a Telemark lake, cave interiors, and satellite views of global extraction sites. A child’s forest fieldwork, data-centre imagery, and lists of lanthanides and red-listed species build a portrait of “critical” minerals as a contested system, industrial, geopolitical, and ecological at once. The film is part of the ongoing Extractions project.
Silva Incognita screens at EcoEchos Film Art Festival in Skien, Norway, and in Brazil (later in 2026).
Director´s Statement
When the mining proposals became public, I found myself holding two incompatible descriptions of the same ground. One measured in rare earth concentrations and strategic value, the other known through footsteps, light, and the little things a child picks up and carries home.
Silva Incognita takes a position, not against extraction as an abstract principle, but with this place, in its specificity. Fensfeltet is a particular forest, a particular wetland, a particular density of threatened species and accumulated time. The film resists the collapse of that specificity into a single narrative of resource and strategic value.
The danger is not industry itself, but the closure of the field. The moment when one description of a place becomes the only permitted one. The film keeps that field open.
A child collecting and spending time in the forest is a different kind of knowledge, grounded in return and attention, that the industry language cannot account for.
This is slow work, made from sustained presence in a place, and I think that's also a kind of position.
