• Anthony D. Barnosky
• Jamie Allen
• Kat Austen
• Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent
• Andrea Borsato
• Neal Cantin
• Shadreck Chirikure
• Nigel Clark
• Ann Cotten
• Andy Cundy
• Kristine L. DeLong
• Daniel Emanuelsson
• Barbara Fiałkiewicz-Kozieł
• Victor Galaz
• Lesley J. F. Green
• Elizabeth A. Hadly
• Irka Hajdas
• Orit Halpern
• Martin J. Head
• Stephen Himson
• Brian Holmes
• Katrin Hornek
• Cymene Howe
• Juliana A. Ivar do Sul
• Jérôme Kaiser
• Kira Lappé
• Maximilian Lau
• Li Li
• Joana MacLean
• Francine M.G. McCarthy
• Michelle Murphy
• Sybille Neumeyer
• Sophia Roosth
• Neil L. Rose
• Oliver Sann
• Susan Schuppli
• Karolina Sobecka
• Allison Stegner
• Benjamin Steininger
• Catherine Tammaro
• Dieter Tetzner
• Liz Thomas
• Simon Turner
• Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
• Stephanie Wakefield
• Colin Waters
• Mark Williams
• Matthew C. Wilson
• Ricarda Winkelmann
• Mi You
• Jan Zalasiewicz
• Jens Zinke

Unearthing the Present Full Program

• Thursday, May 19, 2022

  7:00 pm - 10:30 pm

  Opening Days: Core Readings

  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.

  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

• Friday, May 20, 2022

  9:30 am - 12:30 pm

  Public Forum: Q&A on Revealing the Stratigraphic Anthropocene

  Introduction by Martin J. Head, Jan Zalasiewicz

  This public forum gives the audience a unique occasion to enter into dialogue with AWG and GSSP-researchers working on the stratigraphic Anthropocene and its broader concept. In the framework of a Q&A session, participants will have the opportunity to raise questions regarding the presentations of the previous two days, or more generally regarding the process of defining a GSSP as a boundary for a geological epoch.  The forum will open with a brief summary of the previous two days and an introduction on the protocol for defining a GSSP. This introduction will be led by AWG members who also have a position in the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), to which the AWG will submit their GSSP recommendation in December this year. Representatives of the twelve candidate-GSSP projects, alongside further AWG-members, will respond to questions from the audience.

  Location: Vortragssaal, free admission
  Registration required until May 13

  Further information

• 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

  Exchange on Geo-Inheritance

  Conversation

  With Francine M. G. McCarthy and Lesley Green

  Location: Foyer

• 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm

  Markers—Material Delineations of the Present 1-3

  Demonstrations and discussions, further information

  Environmental Markers to Chemical Violence
  With Lesley Green, Michelle Murphy, Simon Turner
  Location: Vortragssaal

  What’s So Micro About Plastics?
  With Juliana A. Ivar do Sul, Jérôme Kaiser, Kat Austen, Joana MacLean
  Location: Auditorium

  Mud, Materiality & Microfossils
  With Stephen Himson, Allison Stegner, Mark Williams, Matthew C. Wilson
  Location: Ausstellungshalle 2

   

• 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

  Exchange on Disappearance and Extinction

  The extinction of species and the melting of ice are two processes that are not just challenging to grasp in their quantitative magnitude at planetary scale—they are also hard to determine. Yet their quick pace nevertheless places them in the context of unprecedented environmental change and also makes these processes tangible within the tiny temporal brackets of human lives. As scientific evidence on extinction rates becomes increasingly refined, the realities of species loss and the disappearance of glaciers and entire ecosystems will also come to feed people’s biographical and intergenerational memory. How might we mediate these forms of knowledge, and what cultural concepts are implied in the scientific language used to label these dynamics?

  Participants: Anthony D. Barnosky, Cymene Howe

  Location: Foyer

• 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm

  Markers—Material Delineations of the Present 4-6

  Demonstrations and discussions, further information

  Reading the Ashes
  With Barbara Fiałkiewicz-Kozieł, Neil L. Rose, Benjamin Steininger
  Location: Auditorium

  Conversations Beyond the Human
  With Kat Austen, Kristine L. DeLong, Jens Zinke, Nigel Clark
  Location: Ausstellungshalle 2

  Troubling Sedimentations
  With Maximilian Lau, Francine M. G. McCarthy, Sybille Neumeyer
  Location: Vortragssaal

• 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

  Markers—Material Delineations of the Present 7-8

  Demonstrations and discussions, further information

  Archaeology of the Anthropocene
  With Shadreck Chirikure, Katrin Hornek, Kira Lappé, Oliver Sann, Simon Turner
  Location: Auditorium

  Fingerprints of the Nuclear Age
  With Andy Cundy, Irka Hajdas, Colin Waters, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Susan Schuppli
  Location: Ausstellungshalle 2

• Saturday, May 21, 2022

  2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

  Exchange on Deep Time and Deep Response-ability

  Conversation

  With Jamie Allen and Irka Hajdas

  Location: Foyer

• 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

  Exchange on Collaboration and Complexity

  Different institutions have been involved in the formalizing process of the Anthropocene, among them the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) alongside the cultural institution Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the scientific research institute Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. In this session, Simon Turner, the scientific coordinator of the AWG project, and Victor Galaz, a scholar of complex systems, governance and global sustainability, focus on the difficulties and affordances of such an undertaking. While scientifically studying the concurrence between transformations in social, financial and environmental systems remains challenging, at the institutional level we may ask: How best can organizations reconcile alliance building, promote public discussions on environmental crises and nurture cultural shifts?

  Participants: Victor Galaz, Simon Turner

• 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm

  Clashing Presents: Between Big Melt and Small Governance

  Proceeding from stratigraphic analysis on Palmer Peninsula, Antarctica, this session contrasts the temporalities of the tipping points in the Antarctic ice shield with the temporal dynamics of political institutions. How do policies need to change in order to do justice to the vanishing cryosphere? Which temporal immediacies and horizons do new forms of collectives, connected through a rising global ocean, need to coalesce?

  With Victor Galaz, Cymene Howe, Liz Thomas and Ricarda Winkelmann, further information

  Location: Auditorium

• 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm

  Clashing Presents: Memory and Oblivion in Times of Extinction

  Through examining the recent biotic changes recorded in the sediments of the San Francisco Bay, this session explores the accelerating processes and cumulative events of species extinction. In the face of the sixth mass extinction, the cultural foundations of archiving, preserving and memorizing find expression in the conservation of genetic information for species, in resurrection biology and in de-extinction methods. To what degree can we know the scope and pace of current species extinction? Are we even capable of grasping the irreversibility of biological extinction? How do extinction events inform our understanding of life and species in general?

  With Orit Halpern, Stephen Himson, Sophia Roosth, Mark Williams and Matthew C. Wilson, further information

  Location: Auditorium

• 5:00 pm - 9:00 pm

  What if the Dam was removed?

  The confrontation with and mitigation of the ruptures that the Anthropocene has set in motion are taking place in both complex and very particular socio-ecological landscapes. What could a single major infrastructural decision tell us about the situational contexts of bringing about lasting change?

  In the hills above San Francisco lies the Searsville Reservoir. Long out of use, it is by now almost entirely filled with sediments. While these sedimentary layers provide excellent data sets for geologists of the Anthropocene, the dam holding the reservoir causes a variety of ecological problems. So, what if the dam was removed?

  Scientists, researchers and artists take this speculative case study as a starting point to extrapolate on the manifold ramifications that such an intervention would entail. In presentations and discussion, they will address the questions of agency and governance that underlie any meaningful answer to the social and ecological challenges of the Anthropocene.

  This session explores the situational contexts, histories of power and social norms that define the ways and means available for making change in a transforming world. “What If the Dam Was Removed?” explores how these governance models, contestations and negotiations can help us understand and address the storied power dynamics that situate agency not just at this site but anywhere.

  With Anthony Barnosky, Lesley Green, Elizabeth Hadly, Michelle Murphy, Orit Halpern, Brian Holmes, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Karolina Sobecka, M. Allison Stegner, Stephanie Wakefield and Mi You

  Location: Foyer

• 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

  Clashing Presents: Reconciling Presents

  Mineral deposits in caves can contain rich data sets on past environmental conditions. But chemical information in water and minerals often takes a long time to travel from Earth’s surface and into caves, where they then slowly solidify as stalagmites and other forms of speleothems. This often results in a time lag of several decades between a climate event and its recording within a cave structure. This session takes the stratigraphic research in Ernesto Cave, Italy, as a literal and metaphorical starting point to explore possibilities of reconfiguration and reconciliation of the conflicting temporalities of the Anthropocene. How can we conceive a truly planetary time? Is decelerating a viable strategy for gaining time? Or should we rather make efforts to turn the time of confusion and collapse into a time of potential and renewal?

  With Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Andrea Borsato, Ann Cotten, Nigel Clark and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, further information

  Location: Auditorium

• Sunday, May 22, 2022

  2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

  Exchange on Melting Narrations

  How can we mediate and embed scientific findings into new narrations? And what contingency, what order, will these narrations have? Starting from their extensive research on ice cores, artist Susan Schuppli and paleoclimatologist Liz Thomas will reflect on the processification of ice and its situated material condition in evidence-based research. They will discuss the procedures of “continuous flow analysis” as well as their practical and epistemic preconditions that help to read climate developments into the past and future.

  Participants: Susan Schuppli, Liz Thomas

  Location: Foyer

• 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

  Exchange on the Half-Life of the Nuclear Age

  The presence of critical radioactivity in environments everywhere on the planet is owed to mid-twentieth-century atomic weapon tests as well as to the ongoing use of nuclear energy and concomitant accidents. While the notion of the “Nuclear Age” evoked the idea of a legacy from the past only a few years ago, we currently face a much different nuclear situation amid ongoing geopolitical shifts and ruptures. What are the prospects of living among radioactive substances as military spending on atomic weapons increases and some countries invest in and maintain nuclear power on their paths to “net zero” CO₂ emissions?

  Participants: Brian Holmes, Andy Cundy

  Location: Foyer

• 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

  How to Read a Changing Earth? Live Annotation of the Searsville Reservoir Sediment Core

  What do Earth’s archives reveal? How has human activity inscribed itself into the Earth? And how can a defunct reservoir in Northern California point to wider histories of globalization and colonization as well as speculative futures of mass extinction? Through live annotation of a sediment core from the Searsville Reservoir, the final event of Unearthing the Present will uncover the anthropogenic markers inscribed into this stratigraphic material and explore how the material archive of the Searsville Dam witnesses biodiversity loss, unfulfilled political-economic dreams, the activation of tipping points and a planet entering a new epoch. Within the Earth Indices exhibition of Giulia Bruno and Armin Linke, the Stanford University scientists who produced this material research will enter a dialogue with the audience through a rereading of the original-scale scan of the twelve-meter drill core. This discussion will be accompanied by Marc Evanstein’s musical interpretation of the recorded pollen in the core, a composition reflecting the reservoir’s past and ongoing environmental change.

  With Anthony D. Barnosky, Elizabeth A. Hadly and Allison Stegner

  Location: Foyer