- Neal Cantin
- Kristine L. DeLong
- Daniel Emanuelsson
- Francine M.G. McCarthy
- Michelle Murphy
- Sophia Roosth
- Susan Schuppli
- Liz Thomas
- Mark Williams
- Jens Zinke
Core Readings
Unearthing the Present Opening Days
The onset of the Anthropocene has already left deep imprints in Earth’s sediments. But of what kind? And how can they be read? What do they reveal about the social, political and technological transformations over the last century?
For the opening night of Unearthing the Present, scientists, researchers and artists undertake a series of close readings in the stratigraphic archives of the Anthropocene.
By jointly studying an Antarctic ice core, the sediments of a Canadian lake and coral samples from the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, they chronicle the industrial impacts, technological changes, social transformations and violent ruptures of the emerging Earth epoch. Using live inputs from research sites and laboratories, participants develop an experimental practice of deciphering the present through its traces in Earth’s strata.
The Core Readings probe the potential of stratigraphic research to make the Anthropocene materially legible as a truly novel and potentially cataclysmic horizon within Earth history and, with it, human history.
Image: Satellite image of algal blooms around Gotland Island in the Baltic Sea, Photo: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/USGS, Wikimedia Commons / The water-sediment interface in a short sediment core recovered by the multicorer, Photo: © Jerome Kaiser; Collage: NODE Berlin Oslo
- Thursday, May 19, 2022
7:00 pm - 10:30 pm
The sediments of Canada’s Crawford Lake record traces of the Anthropocene—and much more: changes the sediment composition and color show that the area was inhabited as early as the thirteenth century. This raises the question of how different forms of societal organization and land use affect the environment on local and planetary levels. Reading this earth archive also brings the very practice of reading and the position of the reader to the fore. Who is looking for what and with which interests? How do history and culture inscribe themselves into stratigraphic knowledge production?
The ice core from the Antarctic Peninsula contains detailed data on Antarctica’s environmental history, from the amount of local snowfall to rising CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere. But highly technical laboratory equipment is required to to analyze and decipher the gasses and particles trapped within the ice. While the recent increase in heat waves indicates that the Antarctic Peninsula is particularly sensitive to anthropogenic climate change, Antarctica as a landscape still seems to defy an anthropocentric gaze. But is Antarctica also a geological, political, or even economic space?
The sediment cores from Sihailongwan Maar in China are particularly marked by the history of Chinese industrialization. Both socio-political upheavals and technological change can be precisely traced in the sediment samples. In this session, participants will explore the chemical markers of Chinese environmental and industrial history and the different ways in which energy sources and usage have been conceptualized in northeastern China.
Coral samples from West Flower Garden Bank Reef (Gulf of Mexico, USA) and Flinders Reef (Coral Sea, Australia) have recorded a variety of anthropogenic signals, including ocean warming and the impacts of offshore oil extraction. The changing climate, which is so accurately recorded by coral reefs, increasingly also leads to their demise. How do we conceive of coral as a life form? What does it mean to read in an archive signs of its impending destruction?
With Neal Cantin, Kristine DeLong, Daniel Emanuelsson, Francine McCarthy, Michelle Murphy, Sophia Roosth, Susan Schuppli, Liz Thomas, Mark Williams, Jens Zinke and many others.
Location: Auditorium
