Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains
Screening of Justin Bennett’s Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains at Inversia Festival, Murmansk
Murmansk Regional Museum
Lenina 90,
Murmansk, Russia
03/02/2018, 16:30h
In this docu-fiction short film, we meet Viktor Koslovsky, a geologist who worked at the Kola Super-Deep Borehole near Zapolyarny in north-west Russia until it was shut down. Ever since, Viktor has stayed on-site as much as possible, carrying on the work started by Dr. Huberman, the founder of the project. He recounts the history of the KSD and the geology and history of the area. He guides us around the ruined site, his small laboratory and of course the borehole itself. He explains his work, listening to vibrations deep within the earth, linking geology with Sami shamanism and divination.
The Kola Super-Deep Borehole is the deepest man-made hole on earth – more than 12 km deep. It was a Soviet geology research project started during the Cold War. In addition to gathering data about the geology of the earth’s crust it formed part of Project Globus, a network of seismic listening stations which was to act as an early-warning system for natural disasters as well as for monitoring enemy nuclear tests. After the fall of the Soviet Union the project was slowly wound up and the site was abandoned in 2008.