Handstein, 2025
3D-printed sculpture with dual video projection
PLA, projected digital video
20 × 20 × 140 cm

The act of extraction has shaped not only material economies, but the very ways in
which the earth is made meaningful. Mining offered not only material wealth, but a
confrontation with a world fundamentally unlike the one humans inhabited above
ground. In Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford describes the mine as “the first completely inorganic environment to be created and lived in by man,” a space wholly detached from the cycles of birth and decay that govern life on the surface. Within the mine, the miner enters an environment of pure matter, engulfed in air that corrodes the lungs and rock that threatens to collapse at any moment. This subterranean world, Mumford writes, is “nothing less in fact than the concrete model of the conceptual world which was built up by the physicists of the seventeenth century.” The miner encountered an earth that is not their natural habitat anymore, but a place that is wholly antithetical and unreciprocal to their presence; a world that is unending, unmovable, and eternal. By entering the mine, for the first time in history, they encountered a planet.

The Handstein emerged as an attempt to translate that encounter back into the realm of the living. Originating in the Erzgebirge region of Saxony and Bohemia during the silver rushes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Handsteine were
composite sculptural objects combining raw, silver-rich ore and miniature figurative scenes. Saints, miners, churches, and mining structures are erected on jagged veins and vividly colored crystals. Polished silver-rich minerals such as proustite—responsible for the characteristic red hue of many Handsteine—were set alongside religious iconography, embedding spiritual meaning directly on the disorderly material products of extraction.

The incorporation of silver in these objects not only underscored their value, silver also contained a profound allegorical function. Silver’s theological significance is not derived from its raw state, but from its potential for transformation. Its whiteness and glare is revealed only through a process of intense refinement—firing, hammering, and purification—mirroring the Christian conception of continuous spiritual labor and the cleansing of sin. Unlike gold, which was understood as wholly divine, silver occupied an intermediary position between the sacred and the profane. The material’s reflective qualities when used as a mirror, along with its ability to produce sound as trumpets, led to the interpretation that it had communicative properties, conveying the glory of God to life on earth. Angel wings have frequently been represented as silver, reflecting the traditional concept of angels serving as messengers of God. Its durability and value also made it the preferred metal for coinage, embedding it within the mechanisms of everyday economic life. In this sense, silver functioned as a material analogue to the Word of God: circulating through human systems, animating them from within.
Mumford situates mining in the Erzgebirge at the foundation of modern capitalism, and the Handstein must be understood within this context. The extensive circulation of Erzgebirge-minted ‘Thaler’ coins—the linguistic precursor to the term ‘dollar’—highlights the significant legacy of the Silverrush in this region. What began as cooperative partnerships among free miners rapidly evolved into capital-intensive enterprises requiring speculative investment in shares. Deep shafts, water-powered machinery, and complex ventilation systems required large pools of investment, drawing in royal and bourgeois financiers and precipitating early economic bubbles long before the Dutch tulip crisis. Within this emerging capitalist framework, the Handstein functioned not only as a devotional object, but as a gift to potential investors, signaling anticipated profitability of their investment into a mine. In this sense, it operates as a historical precursor to the contemporary ‘deal toy,’ produced for stakeholders to commemorate and aestheticize financial success.

At the same time, the Handstein served a deeper ideological function as a conduit for knowledge: it consecrated practices that were fundamentally at odds with Christian ethics. Mining was inseparable from exploitation, environmental devastation, and the production of materials for warfare. The suffering of miners’ bodies along with greed associated with extractive activities stood in direct contradiction to the christian doctrines of humility and the sanctity of life. The Handstein emerges precisely within this tension, mediating between destruction and faith. By reframing subterranean labor as participation in God’s creation, the object absorbed greed, suffering, and extraction into a theological system that rendered them legible and morally meaningful. It became a means of correspondence with an underworld that was otherwise mute and deeply hostile.

My Handstein continues this correspondence in a contemporary register. Produced centuries after the end of the silver rush, it adopts the sterile visual language of the deal toy while stripping it of narrative certainty. Constructed using 3D-scanned rocks and minerals, the object’s form is rendered via LiDAR technology, a tool extensively employed in the extraction industry. This process abstracts geometric features independently from colour, composition, and mineral value. The result is a purified structure of matter without origin, promise, or purpose. In contrast, moving shadows of birds and trees are cast across its rigid surfaces, introducing fleeting organic rhythms that functions as a portal to the world above ground.

Positioned on a pedestal, the work oscillates between relic and model, devotion and speculation. Unlike its historical predecessors, it does not seek to resolve the contradictions it contains. Instead, it exposes them—suggesting that the structure of matter itself continues to carry its own agency beyond our control or comprehension.