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Auditorium, HKW

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