Fine Arts Lecture Series – Su Yu Hsin

Water as a Geoarchive in our Technonatural Present

Su Yu Hsin, a Taiwanese artist and filmmaker based in Berlin, will talk about her extensive research and fieldwork focus on relations between ecology and technology, specifically through the politics of water. Over the past years, she followed the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which controls 84% of the market for chips with the smallest, most efficient circuits. These chips power not only smartphones but also satellite systems and the arms industry. Semiconductor production, however, consumes an enormous amount of water—raising urgent questions of power, distribution, and environmental degradation.

Her ongoing video trilogy follows this trajectory from TSMC’s headquarters in Hsinchu (Taiwan) to its expanding onshore operations in Phoenix (USA) and Dresden (Germany). Following Su’s lecture, we will screen the first two chapters of the trilogy: Particular Waters (2023) and Where Clouds Once Formed (2025). Particular Waters reconstructs Hsinchu’s 2021 drought through the perspective of a female water truck driver, probing the ecological consequences of industrial expansion and resource extraction. Where Clouds Once Formed focuses on the colonial water infrastructure in the Salt River Valley of Arizona. Despite the state having long been plagued by drought, the massive semiconductor plants were built. Su juxtaposed the poem Cloud Song by the Tohono O'odham poet Ofelia Zepeda with the resource-intensive cloud infrastructure in the desert metropolitan.