Underwater Cosmologies is an ongoing umbrella project created directly in response to the climate crisis, in which we use participatory soundwalks, audio guides and installations, to provoke critical discourse and imaginative possibilities around the future of freshwater and marine ecosystems. By investigating different bodies of water and treating them as deep archives, we want to examine water’s fluid heritage as a place of geo-cultural and human-non-human memory. The project intertwines research from several fields of study: sound and media art, art in public space, the field of locative media and technology, the field of sensory studies and emotional geographies and finally, the field of environmental and sustainability studies.
In ”Water And Dreams” Gaston Bachelard writes that ”water truly is the transitory element. It is the essential, ontological metamorphosis between fire and earth. A being dedicated to water is a being in flux.” Alas, water is the connecting element, the most transitional element as it can exist in solid, fluid and gaseous form. In a time of climate and ecological emergency we keep this project open in terms of practice in order to better be able to react and resonate with the site in question to foster a critical discourse and imaginative possibilities around the current status and future of the marine ecosystems at a perilous moment in time. We want to examine water’s fluid ontology and the forms of life it enables, specifically, position water as shared human-non-human heritage and a site of geo-cultural memory, while recognizing that water always comes to us mediated. With this, we adopt the critical apparatus of media theory to think about geology, heritage, history and memory in terms of dynamic processes rather than solid objects. Furthermore, we would like to move beyond the perception of water in its oceanic arrangements only in terms of “fluidity” and to see it also as “a social space”, encapsulating a complex power relations. We would like to address hydromedia as a conceptual tool that will allow us to view cultural practices constitutively entangled with their environments, outlining more fluid post-Anthropocene ethics.
Our research focuses on the awareness of marine worldviews and a deeper understanding of the changes in marine ecosystems management as well as water politics in general. By focusing on story-telling as a method to trace the archives of underwater memory and its corporality we want to ask how we can engage with liquid violence, hydropoetics of displacement, and inland water's forensics. What can we learn about our corporeality from the underwater cosmologies and how can we formulate new ways of fluidity?
Underwater Cosmologies:
Ancestors of the Future
Audio-visual work
# 1 or 4-Channel Video Stream
Surround Sound
Surround Sound
The piece was originally premiered as a slowfloat - a site-specific audio guide for floating on Lake Ohrid in spring of 2024, before being developed into a larger multichannel audio-visual work based on the conducted research during the artists’ residency at PROSPER AiR in Ohrid (North Macedonia).
Screen shots from the artwork.
People of Eels constitutes the first chapter of the bigger project Ancestors of the Future, an interdisciplinary endeavor exploring the intersections of environmental destruction, cultural memory, and speculative futures through immersive audio-visual narratives. By adopting perspectives from non-human agents it challenges anthropocentric worldviews and advocates for reimagining our relationship with the environment by highlighting the stakes of environmental degradation. Foregrounding the perspectives of non-human entities, each chapter invites the viewers to confront the consequences of human activity while envisioning alternative futures of coexistence.
Documentation from the German premiere at Luminafest Light and Video Festival in Amberg/Weiden 2024.