Cranes on flat country. A Taiwanese chip giant is building Europe’s biggest semiconductor factory north of Dresden. The “building blocks of modern economy” play a central role against China, the USA, the rest of the world … Yet it is precisely in this place, where the new is grandly heralded, that a “forgotten future” lies buried. This was the centre of GDR semiconductor research, which strove to realise a social utopia by means of microelectronics. Some see the chip as a “weapon” in the fight for economic dominance and profit, others saw it as a political programme on the path to the “new human”. Jonas Meschede mixes neon-coloured images of a futuristic setting from the cleanrooms of the present with GDR science fiction and archive footage, unearthing what was buried. Once more, the promises of a golden future appear at the end. And the certainty that in the ground on which its gleaming factories are built what was declared dead only lies dormant.

Grit Lemke