A Step on the Sun

In “A Step on the Sun,” the artist focuses on hardships overcome by a sulfur miner in the Ijen volcano, in the East Java province of Indonesia. Biggs’s video centers around a crater situated almost two miles above sea level, which houses the world’s largest sulfuric lake. We watch as the miner collects hardened sulfur crystals and packs them into a basket. Amid clouds of toxic sulfur dioxide gas, he carries heavy loads up a steep, rocky path from the crater floor to the rim, then to a distant weigh-station. The footage confronts us with a provocative mixture of natural beauty and human exploitation.

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