Ursula Biemann: Carbon Ecologies

Ursula Biemann CARBON ECOLOGIES

0

First published online, 26th March 2014, by the International New Media Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition:

Ursula Biemann

CARBON ECOLOGIES

26th March – 23rd May 2014 inmg.uk Exhibition curated by Edwin Coomasaru.

Assisted by Theresa Deichert, Isabella Smith and Tom Snow.

Edited by Edwin Coomasaru. Assisted by Isabella Smith.

All rights reserved. © International New Media Gallery, 2014.

Texts © the authors, 2014.

Images © Ursula Biemann, 2014.

The catalogue front and back cover are stills from Ursula Biemann’s Deep Weather, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

1

Ursula Biemann CARBON ECOLOGIES

Edited by Edwin Coomasaru

Contents p.4

Foreword Edwin Coomasaru

p.7

Ursula Biemann: Art in the Anthropocene Rahma Khazam

p.11

.

This is Not a Pipeline: Ursula Biemann and the Politico-Aesthetics of Oil Andrew Pendakis

p.20

Fluid Territories Nabil Ahmed

Published online, 26th March 2014 INTERNATIONAL NEW MEDIA GALLERY 2

Ursula Biemann, still from Deep Weather, 2013, video essay, 9 minutes and 18 seconds. Courtesy of the artist.

Ursula Biemann, still from Deep Weather, 2013, video essay, 9 minutes and 18 seconds. Courtesy of the artist.

3

Foreword

‘The relationship between resources, land, and the people is a violent affair; even though the violent relations can sometimes look like a peaceful landscape’, states the narrator of Black Sea Files (2005). This relationship is the focus of Ursula Biemann: Carbon Ecologies (2014). At centre stage is carbon, the chemical element released when fossil fuels are burnt, that bonds with oxygen to produce CO2. This process has been shown to contribute to climate change, rising sea levels, and shifting atmospheric conditions.1 The video essays Black Sea Files and Deep Weather (2013) investigate the socio-political and ecological effects of oil extraction to consider an ecology – and perhaps an ontology – of carbon. Whereas ecology is the study of the relationships between organisms and their surroundings, ontology is a branch of metaphysics that explores the nature of being.

Black Sea Files and Deep Weather document the disastrous consequences of the world’s thirst for oil, from Caspian crude to the Canadian tar sands. Biemann’s work examines displacement, poverty, conflict, and environmental degradation. While the blame is clearly attributed to human activity, what becomes clear is that ‘nature’ is not merely a blank canvas to be shaped by man-made fantasies of domination. In fact, Deep Weather emphasises the fragility of human territories and civilisation in the face of the awesome power of planetary atmospheric systems. ‘Cyclones roar over Bangladesh in unpredictable intervals, powerful inward spiralling winds … approaching within lightning speed’, whispers the narrator over sounds of roaring gales. The portraits of Bangladeshi residents, whose bodies – even when mobilised in mass efforts to build flood defences – seems little match for the rising sea levels, which reduce land to ‘little more than a constantly fluctuating mobile mass’.

Considering such destructive forces, could the earth have a death drive propelling it towards annihilation? Counter to James Lovelock's Gaia theory of planetary self-regulation;2 Reza Negarestani speculates that there is almost something Freudian about the way petroleum has been formed under extreme pressure deep underground, ‘able to gather the necessary geo-political undercurrents’ required for ‘moving of the Earth’s body toward … utter degradation’.3 For Emily Apter, this suggestion ‘engenders an anticapitalist planetary politics because it indicts the global corporate interests of Big Oil’.4 It also demonstrates that the dream of human superiority over ‘nature’ is utterly precarious: the consumption of fossil fuels unleashes powers far beyond control of man – that will ultimately lead to his ruination. The final scene of Black Sea Files, filmed amongst building debris, seems symbolic of an impending apocalypse – hinting at an image of a world without us.

I would like to thank Rahma Khazam, Andrew Pendakis, and Nabil Ahmed for contributing to the catalogue. Khazam’s essay, ‘Ursula Biemann: Art in the Anthropocene’, explores the artist’s portrayal of the closely connected relationships between nature and mankind. Meditating on our cultural connotations around oil and water, in Pendakis’ interview with Biemann he suggests that Black Sea Files 4

challenges the petroleum industry’s tightly policed images of resource extraction.

Pendakis touches on the significance of water, a line of analysis developed further

by Ahmed in his essay, ‘Fluid Territories’. Ahmed considers the increasingly mobile and mutable nature of land effected by global warming – and the potential to contemplate a ‘co-habitation’ with the earth.

My thanks go to Ursula Biemann for being generous with her time and a real pleasure to work with. I would also like to thank Theresa Deichert, Isabella Smith, and Tom Snow for their invaluable work assisting the exhibition curation, organising the public programme, and working on the publicity campaign.

Edwin Coomasaru, Director International New Media Gallery

Notes 1

Susan Solomon, Gian-Kasper Plattner, Reto Knutti, and Pierre Friedlingstein, ‘Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions’, PNAS, Volume 106, Number 9 (February 2009), pp.10741079.

2 James Lovelock, ‘Geophysiology, the science of Gaia’, Reviews of Geophysics, Volume 27, Issue 2 (May 1989), pp.215–222.

3 Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re:press, 2008), p.17.

4 Emily Apter, ‘Planetary Dysphoria’, Third Text, Vol. 27, Issue 1 (January 2013), pp.131-140, p.137.

5

Ursula Biemann, still from Deep Weather, 2013, video essay, 9 minutes and 18 seconds. Courtesy of the artist.

Ursula Biemann, still from Deep Weather, 2013, video essay, 9 minutes and 18 seconds. Courtesy of the artist.

6

Ursula Biemann: Art in the Anthropocene Rahma Khazam

According to cultural historian Jill Bennett, art will undergo radical changes in the Anthropocene era.1 Like everyone else, artists will need to cultivate an ecological mindset and address the complexity of the ecosystems of which they are part.2 The work of video essayist Ursula Biemann heralds such a transformation. Enacting the shift from art as an end product, to art as a means of highlighting human/environment interdependence, it engages with the scientific, geopolitical, philosophical and social implications of corporate environmental despoliation.

Take her video Deep Weather (2013), which highlights the environmental impact of the ongoing tar sands mining operations in the boreal forests of Northern Canada – at the local and global levels. The piece opens with views of the devastation provoked by the highly toxic open pit extraction zone in Alberta, switching after a little over two minutes to no less harrowing shots of stricken Bangladeshi flood victims engaged in constructing mud embankments, in a vain effort to protect themselves against the effects of global warming. Deep Weather's arresting contrasts and cataclysmic imagery offer a disturbing and provocative interpretation of the current environmental status quo - which endorses the objectification and commodification of natural resources despite the unsustainability of such an approach.

For Biemann however, these images are not to be viewed in isolation, but as part of an ongoing inquiry that cross-references a constellation of recurring leitmotifs and ideas. Her crusade against the objectification of natural resources ties in with FÊlix Guattari's refutation of the separateness of nature, which, as T.J. Demos points out, constitutes a significant theoretical resource for current practice in the field of ecologically engaged art.3 Deep Weather can also be viewed in relation to Michel Serres' The Natural Contract,4 in that it likewise takes stock of the uncontrolled violence that is currently being perpetrated against nature by the human race. It also echoes other topics alluded to in Serres' book – the inability of humans to keep pace with the geological and climatic catastrophes they have unleashed, or to reconcile short-term economic goals with the far longer timescales required to replenish the resources of the Earth.

Equally fraught is the relationship between man and nature sketched out in an earlier video of Biemann's, Black Sea Files (2005). Consisting of interviews with oil workers, refugees, farmers and prostitutes who worked or lived along the construction route of the giant subterranean oil pipeline running westwards from the Caspian Sea, it highlights the living conditions of these unheard victims of environmental change, who are discounted by corporate and governmental claims.

For Biemann, Black Sea Files also gestures towards more theoretical concerns, and in particular Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's notion of perspectival multinaturalism, which takes as its starting-point the belief of Amazonian peoples that the original condition of humans and animals is not animality but humanity.5 For the Brazilian anthropologist, the consequence of conceiving of animals as a kind of human is to attribute to them intentionality and agency, as well as a distinctive point of view.6 7

Black Sea Files can also be said to reject the idea of a single or dominant reality, in favour of multiple and equally valid points of view.

Like oil, water can also generate rich, multi-layered narratives. Take Egyptian Chemistry (2012), in which Biemann addresses Egypt's long-standing relationship with water, and in particular the impact of the Aswan High Dam, whose completion in 1970 has had a lasting effect on the ecology of the Nile. Adopting a holistic approach that intertwines social, natural, technological and chemical processes, she looks at how soil and water development in Egypt is undergoing a fundamental shift as a result of the combined action of geophysical forces, corporate organisations, technology, micro-ecologies and tiny pollutants. Her compelling narrative sheds new light on the entanglements between human and non-human actants – in line with the ecological worldview necessitated by the advent of the Anthropocene.

The entanglements between man and nature sketched out in Egyptian Chemistry also tie in with the findings of quantum physics: Nobel Prize-winner Niels Bohr, for instance, rejected the separation between the observer and the observed, the knower and the known.7 Even more relevant to Biemann's work however, are the writings of another physicist, Karen Barad, whose argument that reality results from the entanglement of mind and matter, and that we are consequently deeply implicated in its making, has considerably influenced Biemann's understanding of video-making: in Biemann's view, video does not simply consist of presenting a situation in one way or another in accordance with the filmmaker's intentionality, but generates a reality of its own that can confront and unsettle dominant claims, with a view to righting the ecological balance.

In her current video project Forest Law (2014), a collaboration with architect and urbanist Paulo Tavares, Biemann once again explores human/nature entanglements through the prism of anthropological research. The work comprises an interview with the leader of the Sarajaku nation in Ecuador, who declares that the lives of his people are intertwined with the mountains, the trees and the entire natural space.

He also refers to the living forest as a place where micro and macro organisms communicate with each other and with his people. In this project, Biemann is working with the writings of prominent anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, who has explored similar notions in his book How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human.8 Drawing on C.S. Peirce's Theory of Signs, Kohn eschews symbolic representation, which is a typically human construct, in favour of the nonlinguistic forms of representation we share with the rest of non-human biological life – namely likeness and indexicality. For Kohn, it is these non-linguistic modes of representation that make it possible to open up a conceptual aperture that might allow us to think with, and not just about, forests,9 as in the case of the interviewee in Forest Law. As Jill Bennett points out, environmentally engaged works reach out beyond the formal or thematic logic that binds together an exhibition.10 This is clearly the case of Biemann's videos, which downplay art-historical references, revealing instead new patterns of connection between resource management, physics, the Ecuadorian rainforest and population flows, that run counter to the ongoing commodification of nature. The question now is whether this type of art can help to change the corporate mindset that authorises environmental despoliation – and thereby meet the challenge of the Anthropocene.

8

Rahma Khazam is a freelance writer, critic and art historian based in Paris. She is a regular contributor to artist catalogues and contemporary art magazines, including Artforum, Flash Art, and Leonardo.

Notes 1

Jill Bennett, ‘Living in the Anthropocene’, in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev ed., The Book of Books (Berlin and Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), pp.345-347,, p.346.

2 Ibid, p.346-347.

3 T.J. Demos, ‘Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology: An Introduction’, Third Text, Vol. 27, Issue 1 (January 2013), pp.1-9, p.2.

4 Michel Serres, The Natural Contract (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

5 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies’, in Anselm Franke ed., Animism: Volume I (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), pp.227-242, p.227.

6 Ibid, pp.228-229.

7 Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Volume 28, Number 3 (2003), pp.801-831, p.814, note 18.

8 Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2013).

9 See Eduardo Kohn, ‘Thinking with a Forest's Thoughts’, Berkley Centre for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society, Berkeley (10/5/13). Available online: youtube.com/watch?v=mSdrdY6vmDo. 10 Bennett, p.347.

9

Ursula Biemann, still from Black Sea Files, 2005, two-channel video essay, 43 minutes and 54 seconds.

Courtesy of the artist.

Ursula Biemann, still from Black Sea Files, 2005, two-channel video essay, 43 minutes and 54 seconds.

Courtesy of the artist.

Ursula Biemann, still from Black Sea Files, 2005, two-channel video essay, 43 minutes and 54 seconds.

Courtesy of the artist.

10

This is Not a Pipeline: Ursula Biemann and the Politico-Aesthetics of Oil Andrew Pendakis

Andrew Pendakis: I want to begin by asking you a very general question about the aesthetics of what we might call primary substances: those materials or liquids, like oil, water and coal, which come to peculiarly mark or subtend the cultural structure of an economy. I am interested particularly in those substances which we are tempted to imagine vertically at the bottom of things, the floorboards or groundwork of any given historical period or locale. Both water and oil would appear to be candidates here: the first, indispensable, structural, perhaps, in a manner wholly unto itself, the very ur-liquid of life; the second, a basic condition of modernity, essential but ‘artificial’, as the element necessary less for life itself than life lived under the conditional second nature of industrial capitalism. In what sense can we speak about an aesthetics of oil cultures; a set of recurring spatial, infrastructural, or architectural motifs, for example; or even a dominant structure of feeling or experience which seems to pass through the very molecules of a whole historical reality? Is there an aesthetics of oil or are its cultural manifestations too diverse and localised to be usefully generalised?

Ursula Biemann: Water has traditionally been associated with specific cultural or symbolic meanings, so it is hard to generalise the aesthetic dimension of this lifesustaining liquid. But oil is an entirely different case: it has literally propelled humanity into a different era of mobility and consumption. Hydrocarbon society is rooted in a concrete moment of discovery – it has a specifiable beginning – and an end! It has engendered the whole universe of plastic culture. We usually do not associate crude oil with the vast number of new substances and objects that have entered our lives as products of petrochemistry. In our minds, the preciousness of oil is more closely linked to petrodollars: it is a political substance. Apart from geopolitics and its inevitable spatial tropes – and that is certainly a major problem in the representation of oil – as a mineral resource, the discourse that shapes the image of oil is articulated in economic and industrial terms: it is, in other words, very much a corporate substance as well. Corporations are hyper sensitive when it comes to their public image, they are very careful in controlling visual representation.

There is always some pipeline patrol lurking on the horizon, ready to charge down the hill and prevent you from filming. So we ended up with an aesthetic that essentially foregrounds the gigantic investments in the infrastructures necessary for extraction and evacuation, as well as their spectacular failures. The petro-era coincides with a period marked by technology and hardware; it seems that culturally speaking it has already come to an end.

AP: I think you are right that our conception of oil is usually oriented by this wideangle image of the silently running oil refinery or platform. Oil is, in this sense, dangerously literalised, wrongly conceived as simply coextensive with a highly simplified figure of its own productive apparatus. What do you think is screened out by this image? Also, I am intrigued by this invocation of ‘plastic culture’. Might this 11

be a kind of shorthand for our moment’s particular relation to oil? It is true that it seems the ‘age of oil’ is coming to an end, not in the literal spectre of Peak Oil or some kind of imminent shift to a new primary energy source, but in the sense that oil seems to chug into the present like an echo from the nineteenth century. The roar of the combustion engine feels quaintly modernist, almost embarrassingly promethean and earnest when viewed from the angle of the silent and immobile microchip. Could you speak more about this paradoxical end to (or transformation within) a certain dominant era of petro-culture?

UB: I see this level of abstraction in the representation of oil as yet another way to keep it firmly in the hands of market dynamics, a remote and inaccessible entity, supposedly too big and complex to grasp for the average citizen. What does not come through in these repetitive stencils of oil related images is the regional histories and local textures of interaction between infrastructures and social communities, the thorough reorganisation of cultural alliances and political forces on a regional level, the relocation of populations as a result of big money flowing into an impoverished area and the non-democratic decision-making processes of regimes involved in these deals as well as the impressive epistemic apparatus that is set into motion by the conception of big infrastructure projects. All these dynamics affect large populations one way or another. To begin by giving these ephemeral processes some form of visual presence, is a way to start filling in the missing elements.

The discovery of the vast potential of oil for the creation of new materials mustering an extraordinary range of qualities has fueled our imagination to create a synthetic world and overcome natural limits. This fact is probably just as important for the understanding of who we are today as the mobilisation and substitution of labour power facilitated by the combustion engine itself. It seems to me that humanity has jumped ahead in out-of-synch rhythms. While it advanced its material sophistication to a high degree, the engine remains sadly stuck in the nineteenth century and yet we still invest huge resources into building infrastructures for a system we know is long outdated. But I sense there is another connection there that would be important to understand better. The ability to chemically synthesize the world and thus create its artificial extension has simultaneously triggered an imagination of nature and its relation to the human subject. This bizarre construction of nature as something separate from us is what makes the gigantic ecological devastation of petro-culture possible.

AP: Oil and water, though not quite opposites, are anecdotally understood as chemically incompatible (‘they don’t mix’). This incompatibility mirrors a very strong associative or symbolic antagonism. Oil is arguably the dirtiest of liquids, ‘the devil’s excrement’, not just on the level of its (highly racialised) material properties (its blackness, its stickiness, its opacity, etc.), but on the terrain of its social and political usage. Sociologists have long noted the ways in which reserves of oil have a way of evolving into inflexible or brutal state structures (layers of corrupt officials and bureaucracy) even as they engender uniquely consumerist life-worlds, populations habituated to expect an inexhaustible and ‘labourless’ flow of automobiles, luxury goods, etc. Water seems to come from an utterly opposed moral universe. Linked to ablution, sustenance, openness, transparency, purity (etc.), water is the liquid of transcendence, but also the most modest and common of social goods. This 12

opposition has been dramatically compromised by the increasing commodification of water and the emergence of huge conglomerated interests in the profits available to those who own and market it. How do your works attempt to navigate the existing infrastructural realities of oil and water in the light of these moral geographies? Do you prefer to work within these inherited meanings as a way of mobilising an audience politically or aesthetically or should the artist instead try as hard as possible to have done with moral rhetorics premised on lost purities or ‘nature’?

UB: Rather than looking at oil and water in these essential and nominally opposed terms, I have investigated the environment they each tend to generate in conjunction with human, social and technological entities and these are highly situational. I would refrain from assigning symbolic meaning to the substance itself.

As a corporate capital-intensive fluid, oil tends to create top-down power structures.

It is a deeply anti-democratic substance in that governments, which are thriving on large incomes from fossil resources, have no need to consult their taxpayers to make political decisions: they don’t need a people. States like this are like a head without a body, they are bound to create autocratic regimes. However, there are subtle and brutal processes, both of which are important to show. When I began my research on oil for Black Sea Files (2005) about ten years ago, there was hardly any cultural theory and very few aesthetic productions on the topic. It would have been inconceivable then to organise a conference on petrocultures, since the signification of oil beyond the economic and geopolitical dimension was largely unarticulated. I wish there had been books available then like Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia (2008), which creates a fantastic vocabulary around this dark lubricant and narrative undercurrent of all politics and ethics of life on earth. Without such inspiring prose, I practically had to start from scratch. But what I noticed during my research is that there is a considerable discrepancy between the explanatory heart of energy geography in urban centres and at the campuses, and the messy, remote and unstable resource fringes where these situations take place. There is a centre/periphery dynamic set up between the cores of theory building and the social struggles around the extraction zones. If anything, I see it as my moral obligation to keep establishing the links between them, even at the risk of placing this very process again at the centre.

It has become obvious that ecological devastations go hand in hand with the existential struggles of marginalised communities. But my ongoing concern with the human geographies of hydrocarbon society doesn’t mean that I’m disinterested in the molecular level of how reality constitutes itself through water and oil and a million other things. Interesting that you would mention the chemical reaction between these distinct liquids, since in chemistry, substances are characterised entirely by their willingness to bond and transform into new compounds. Both water and oil are made of hydrogen, when combined with oxygen we get water, when combined with carbon we get oil, each opening up a different arena of

________

13

Ursula Biemann, still from Black Sea Files, 2005, two-channel video essay, 43 minutes and 54 seconds.

Courtesy of the artist.

Ursula Biemann, still from Black Sea Files, 2005, two-channel video essay, 43 minutes and 54 seconds.

Courtesy of the artist.

Ursula Biemann, still from Black Sea Files, 2005, two-channel video essay, 43 minutes and 54 seconds.

Courtesy of the artist.

bonding opportunities. The interaction with one another might be repulsion, but that is still a strong relation, if in the negative. If we looked for the chemical substance common to blood, plants and petroleum, we would find that we share a

14

high degree of DNA. The problem I see with highlighting the cultural value of water by foregrounding its symbolic virtues is that we continue along the line of an economistic thinking that assumes that anything which has a value requires some sort of compensation. It firmly remains within a human-centric vision of culture.

Even before the calamity of bottled water, any hydraulic infrastructure, any dam, barrage or irrigation canal, prepares the ground for the commodification of water.

By processing and facilitating water, it automatically becomes something that can be charged for. States have begun to take into account what they call virtual water: i.e. the water needed to produce something, whether it be a computer chip, roses or a loaf of bread. By importing water-intensive products, a state can save a lot of its own water.

With Supply Lines, a collaborative art and research project on resource geographies I’m involved in, a number of stakes start to emerge. A central issue is to make natural resources a matter of public debate and decision-making rather than leaving it to market dynamics. The question here is how we can engage in aesthetic productions that will make commodities more transparent and accessible to public knowledge. Another point that you just mentioned is to problematise the notion of nature and do away with an anthropocentric perspective on the world whereby everything is turned into a resource for humans. This is strongly linked to the act of representation as a way to shift the discussion from the object of oil, water or gold to the cultural meaning the stuff has for us. The frantic use of global resources goes hand in hand with an accelerating process of over-signification, not least through cultural studies or the tendency to open aesthetic and cultural discussions to fields that have been hitherto subjects of economic-industrial discourses or natural science. These are some of my most urgent concerns: how can I image resource issues in ways that are both signifying and a-signifying. Whether we assign pure and spiritual qualities to water or devilish ones to oil makes no difference, the problem is with representation itself.

AP: You referred above to the omnipresent ‘pipeline patrol’ and this issue of policing touches upon another question I would like to pursue. We are unquestionably living in an age of secrecy – an age in which, one might say, the secret has gone structural. The insider’s stock tip, offshore accounts, classified production facilities, ‘creative accounting’, the research records of pharmaceutical companies: secrets populated earlier societies, and they were perhaps always in some way ‘functional’, but there is a way in which the hidden has become conscious, a basic requirement of the production and reproduction of capitalist economies.

Catherine Malabou speaks of the way neurobiological processes are structurally invisible in the process of creating the transparency of consciousness; Karl Marx’s own work would seem to echo this on the level of production, positing an order of the invisible which renders possible the liberal vista and its life-world. In Black Sea Files you purposively travel to the Southern Caucasus to visually research the construction of the Baku-Tblissi-Ceyhan pipeline; it is as if your objective was to literally capture this mechanism of flow before it was interred permanently into a domain of invisibility and silence. How does your work travel along this thin line between unveiling the hidden and respecting the complexity and opacity of things?

Given the epistemological obsessiveness of your work, how does one reveal without blundering into the territory of absolute transparency? What can you tell us about 15

this process or about your thoughts on the dialectic between seeing and hiding in modern or postmodern economies? What role does secrecy or hiddenness play in the political economy of oil itself?

UB: Are you alluding to the idea that infrastructures are most powerful when they are invisibly operating in the background, hidden from our consciousness? Well, the only way to capture the moment of the giant effort necessary to build such an invisible power structure is by filming the actual construction of this crude oil corridor clearing the access far into former Cold War territory. There is something to be gained from visually mapping these procedures in the most diverse way possible, challenging the monological narration based on technological pioneering. To offset the linear master narrative provided by oil corporations I instead install a loose cartography of multiple voices uttered by migrants, peasants, fishermen, prostitutes, oil workers and the like who intertwine with the pipeline. The powerful impact of invisible structures is true, of course, not just for energy but also, very prominently, for the media apparatus. What is kept in the hidden realm is what’s not considered to be of immediate world interest, which is almost everything. What is shown is merely a selected narrow vision. I see the problem not so much in the incorrect representation but in the selection process itself and the pretense to bring clarity via this scripted formula of news writing, when in my experience, the production of knowledge on site is an immensely confusing and fragile undertaking.

In an interview with two sex workers in the presence of their pimps and agents, I attempt in Black Sea Files to make the emergence of misunderstanding more transparent.

The essayist video format with its diverse image sources, scrolling text and voice-over narration generally tends to stack multiple layers of meaning and interpretation, none of which pretend to be a stable, exclusive representation of reality. On occasion, I even weave myself into the process by reflecting on my practice as an undercover agent to find hidden, secret knowledge and in the process turning into an embedded artist who operates in the trenches of geopolitics. All this is acknowledging the subjective and often subversive dimension of artistic fieldwork that is more closely related to secret intelligence than, say, to anthropology.

AP: As I alluded to above your latest work appears to be focusing less on oil proper and more on the human (and in- or non-human) geographies of water in an age of climate change. And yet there remains a great deal of continuity here: transformations in the viability of global water are only the flip-side of our dependence on fossil fuels, the perverse externality of oil’s central location at the heart of our societies. In the second part of your project Deep Weather (2013), we are presented with an opening shot that almost appears to arrive unfiltered from the origins of stabilised agricultural civilization itself. Approaching from the sea, the camera captures a seemingly infinite line of wriggling human motion, a continuous flow of Bangladeshi workers dragging bags of mud to shore up and secure a barrier they hope will prevent their communities from being flooded by rising waters. This is a primeval image, one resonant with echoes from the original domestication of the Nile and other such ‘cradles of civilization’. In such moments, you seem to be working in a mode that transcends or transmutes realist documentarity, one imbued with a sense for anthropological invariance, the repetitions of cyclical time, even a poesis conceived of as co-extensive with nature itself. I sense a very similar 16

set of concerns in the fragments I have seen from your recent project Egyptian Chemistry (2012). Here again past and present seem bound in a space/time that defies the illusion of their separation, one which draws on myth (without devolving into holism or apoliticism), but also on science or sociology (without giving into determinism or a too-simple empiricism). Am I wrong to think you are trying to invent videographically a new form of universality, one that is fragile, plural, ragged, full of holes, yet somehow coacervated by the muddy oneness of the planet itself? I discern in your work the lineaments of a very interesting materialist universality, one that confidently draws on scientific naturalism, the methodologies of the social sciences (especially ethnography), but also on poetry, aesthetics, and the mythic imagination without stumbling into incoherence or eclecticism.

UB: This unspeakable image of thousands of villagers building a giant mud embankment entirely by hand without any mechanical assistance is what derailed climate patterns and melting ice fields will mean for many of us on earth. The image speaks of the primeval need for safety from extreme weather events and floods and of the futility of believing we could protect life on the planet with ridiculous technological measures. Part 1, by the way, is shot in the toxic tar sands of Alberta where the dirtiest of fossil resources is being extracted that will no doubt continue to impact on the living conditions of populations on the other side of the earth. We are speaking of a terrestrial scale here. When we have been thinking in global dimensions over the last two decades, this is the time to go planetary. And this shift requires a whole new vocabulary, both visual and verbal. Geography as a theoretical platform for tackling global issues such as migration networks, supply lines or communication infrastructures, turns out to be insufficient, or simply too flat, for this enlarged dimension because it falls short of grasping the depth of many dawning questions such as species survival and the transformation of the biosphere.

So my new images intend to evoke temporal depth by returning to moments prior to the industrial revolution with its frantic dam building activity, and to scientistic knowledge with its partition into disciplines and infinite sub-disciplines. It is this alchemist approach of raising metachemical and philosophical concerns, perhaps, that imbues the video with a mythic imagination. Al Khemia (Arabic for chemistry) also happened to be the ancient word for Egypt, meaning the Black Land, possibly due to the dark muddy Nile floods periodically covering the land. The term alludes to the vision that, before anything else, the earth is a mighty chemical body, a place where the crackling noise of the forming and breaking of molecular bonds can be heard at all times. So when documenting vast land reclamation projects in Egypt, beyond a comment on technocapitalism, it is first and foremost a videography of the conversion of desert dust into soggy fertility.

So yes, I would love to think that I am inventing videographically a new, if flawed and ever morphing, sort of ‘universality’ through the meddling with the muddy materiality of the Earth itself. Incidentally, for Egyptian Chemistry I took a number of water samples from the Nile, so the project is not about making images only. I’m not primarily focusing on strategies of representation but also taking indexical traces into account. I have come to realise that if we solely attempt to culturalize the discourse on the physical and chemical transformations our planet is currently undergoing by prioritising meaning and representation, we fail to address a deeper problem. For if we are to speak about the non-human world — weather patterns, organic pollutants, copper atoms — it will not suffice to deploy an 17

anthropocentric discourse. Not everything comes into being through human intention, we need to examine the ways in which human and non-human realities emerge together in a variety of formations. Rather than through a particular set of criteria, this is more likely to happen through the hybrid consciousness engendered by the assemblage of technological, social and natural stuff — where some elements signify, others not. Metachemistry grasps this turbulent instance of physical and epistemic change, or lineament, as you call it, and propels us into a slightly altered dimension that can only be invoked mythically through space travel, time barriers, and the interbiospheric mobility of species.

Andrew Pendakis is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta and an instructor at Alberta’s Campus Saint-Jean.

His areas of research include contemporary social and cultural theory, and political philosophy from 1750 to the present.

This text was originally published in Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies.

18

Ursula Biemann, still from Deep Weather, 2013, video essay, 9 minutes and 18 seconds. Courtesy of the artist.

Ursula Biemann, still from Deep Weather, 2013, video essay, 9 minutes and 18 seconds. Courtesy of the artist.

19

Fluid Territories Nabil Ahmed

I. In Deep Weather (2013) Ursula Biemann tells a fabulation on the violence of anthropogenic climate change through oil and water. In the first part, ‘Carbon Geologies’, the spectral landscape of the Athabasca tar sands show environmental violence at a territorial scale. The aerial camera scans scarred terrains and mining infrastructure. Many of the major players in the extraction industry operate there, seeking heavy oils that lie mixed with minerals and water deep below. It is one of the most contested sites in the environmental movement, as the destructive practices of global capital, oil companies continue to destroy boreal forests and infringe on territorial rights of the First Nations people. In the second part, ‘Hydrogeographies’, men, women and children – the earthmovers of Bangladesh – are seen carrying mud filled sandbags to protect their land against a rising water, arguably due to climate change. The natural violence of the rising sea and waterways in the Bengal Delta is not seen separate from the environmental violence wrecked by oil companies on the other side of the planet. In fact, Bangladeshi villagers deep in the Bengal delta who have no access to fossil fuels have made zero contribution to global warming and the rising sea levels.

The scenography of Deep Weather can be supplanted by a socio-ecological perspective adopted by ecologist Madhav Gadgil and historian Ramachandra Guha, who place two types of socio-ecological classes in opposition: ‘ecosystem people’ who depend on natural resources in their immediate vicinity and ‘omnivores’ who have ‘the political and economic power’ to consume resources on a national and global scale.1 They claim that in the conflict over resources between the two, the omnivores have maintained dominance through their control of state incentives, subsidies, and technological interventions – passing on the costs of resource depletion, environmental degradation and species loss to the ecosystem people.

While the main use value of natural resources is subsistence for the ecosystem people, they are exponentially commoditised for the omnivores.

Yet the labour of the earthmovers is neither to produce economic value, nor free, but to produce land itself and protect what is left. This is a crucial difference that I will outline below. The earthmovers live with an increasingly unpredictable geology, which is fluid, porous, permeable, and unstable. The sea and the waterways against which this specific struggle is waged are also fluid spaces. The materiality of this mutable space is present as the mud filled sandbags pile up like debris. The mud is made up of sedimentation, itself part water and sand. It is a struggle between land and water.

II. In his short work on early colonial globalization, Land and Sea, the political philosopher Carl Schmitt writes about the land and sea as antagonistic elements.

Geo-historically the first is represented by continental powers while the second by maritime powers, symbolised by the land beast Behemoth and the sea monster

20

Leviathan. Following the historian Ernst Kapp, Schmitt sets the scene by describing how power shifted from the fluvial cultures that emerged from the Nile, Tigris, and Mesopotamia, to empires of the closed seas of the Mediterranean followed by truly oceanic civilizations.2 In his view a maritime power such as England triumphed over other European powers because the English could rule the high seas like no other.

In a striking passage of ‘magic attraction’ Schmitt writes how the Venetian empire lost dominance to the ‘children of the sea’. In the ritual ‘marriage of the sea’, every year on the eve of the assumption, the doge of Venice would sail out on the official vessel and toss a ring into the Mediterranean to symbolise its union with the sea.3 This was a ritualistic act of political power claimed with the sea. Yet for Schmitt the throwing of the ring into the sea was an attempt to attract an alien force. On the other hand those from the oceanic civilizations, sailors, whale hunters, ship builders, and pirates cast the majestic, dark swells of the oceans open. Taking to the high seas was nothing short of a spatial revolution, one where the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and finally the English took advantage of the planet’s potential and oceanic forces.

Bringing Schmitt’s proposition to the present day, what happens when an actor in the spatial revolution is the planet itself, where due to anthropogenic climate change the rising sea is encroaching upon land? I think this question is opened up in Biemann’s urgent videography where we see the earthmovers of Bangladesh as a new form of territoriality is being practiced. The situation demands political, economic, legal and technical responses. How can we address the problematic issue that climate change will produce a completely new definition of stateless people where the territory itself is in threat of disappearance? If territory is the basis of statehood and the rights of citizenship, then what can be political and legal realities facing disappearing states? Recently such questions have been raised in the case of Island States in the South Pacific, Indian Ocean or in the Caribbean: Tuvalu, Nauru, Kiribati, Vanuatu, and the Maldives. There is no existing legal mechanism for dealing with people stateless from climate change. While this seems utopian given the way strong states continue to dominate the political arena, should this not be the moment to decouple land from state as many indigenous people do? As Shiv Visvanathan tells us, what politicians and technocrats fail to understand is that for a traditional people, ‘land is not real estate or a space over which people are moved like objects. Land is memory, a map of one's world, a way of life for which people are willing to die’.4 Seen beyond nationalist or even postcolonial narratives, can we not formulate the right to land as a species right?

The earthmovers in Deep Weather are at the frontiers of an earth revolution unfolding across geographies, in making continuous territorial claims as the sea encroaches upon their land. Their collective, creative struggle is situated on a ground that is becoming negative space. While they are communities facing the violent effects of climate change, the transforming, marginal landscape they are making is material proof of this reconceptualisation of territoriality, of living at the limit of land and water, in a future that is immediate. For those of us fortunate to be on dry land in the north, Biemann gives us a space of reflection, to turn on the miner’s lamps on our foreheads.

III. In her earlier work, Black Sea Files (2005), Biemann asks a set of critical ‘anti21

photojournalistic’ questions which I find to be continuously valid for anyone brave enough to venture into an artistic practice she pioneered: What does it mean to take the camera to the field, to go to the trenches?

How did it get to the point where she stands at the front next to the journalists at the very moment of the incident, without press pass or gas mask? What kind of artistic practice does such video footage document?

That of an embedded artist immersed in the surge of human confrontation and confusion? How to resist making the ultimate image that will capture the whole drama in one frame?5 The drama she refers to is set in the vast territories of Asia Minor, along a Caspian pipeline; which is sometimes hidden under the earth, revealing itself like a giant earthworm. Yet the voices of people living along the pipeline's future trajectory as it is being built are placed in front of Biemann’s camera, rather than the narrative of the state and the oil companies. However, to reformulate the question slightly differently, we could ask ‘how to resist making meaning of the whole drama in one frame?’. In Deep Weather the ‘drama’ we face now is on a planetary scale. But in some sense Deep Weather speaks to a condition and responsibility we face as humans to change the way we interact with all matter. But what mode of practice can this take shape in, in the context of Biemann’s work? In order to follow this practice I will briefly discuss another work by Biemann, Egyptian Chemistry (2012) in relation to the only theory novel written by Gabriel Tarde, the hero philosopher of Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour who formulated the social as something akin to chemistry.

In Egyptian Chemistry, molecular water is an actor in a sociochemical inquiry on the contemporary Nile ecologies, along with interviews with scientists, land rights activists, and the metaphysician Graham Harman (both Biemann and Harman are without gas masks, so when the police in the adjacent Tahrir square use tear gas on protesters the interview has to be stopped). Egyptian Chemistry takes the form of a multimedia video installation consisting of water samples, wall drawings of the Nile, and video projections that show the process of water sampling from the field to the laboratory. Similar to how the Caspian pipeline was the narrative thread in Black Sea Files, the Nile river and the water samples taken from its various points emphasises how water in its various guises has shaped contemporary Egyptian life. For example, we hear from Sahinda Maklad, a peasant activist in the Nile delta, about the peasant land rights movement; which began from the 1952 revolution of Gamal Abdel Nasser and survived the neoliberalisation of Egypt during the ‘80s and ‘90s. At the time of the making of the work in 2011, the revolution that was sweeping Egypt produced conditions for the unionisation of peasants. In another part of the work we see government hydraulic engineers working on a giant physical model that is an exact replica of the Nile bed, stretching three kilometers. The biggest hydraulic intervention on the Nile, the Aswan ‘High Dam’, has had far reaching impacts and radical changes to the very relationship between land and water, floods, rain, and draught in Egypt, a country where agriculture is entirely dependent on irrigation.

The dam brought prosperity to Egypt but was also a veritable machine of modernisation as violence. By enabling a dialogue between various disciplines and histories as well investigating the environmental quality of the water, Biemann’s work is an ‘exploration of hybrid ecologies’, of Egypt undergoing a molecular 22

revolution.

Written in 1884, Underground: Fragments of Future Histories is the only work of fiction by the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde. In the book the planet is gripped by a monocultural globalisation. Everyone speaks the same language, which is an odd version of Greek. Science and economy have progressed beyond previous measure.

However, scientists noted that the sun was losing its heat, their warnings largely ignored by politicians. In an eschatological turn, the sun is extinguished and life on the planet is faced with extinction. As the surface of the planet became cold and unbreathable the survivors decide to go underground, thus beginning a new, telluric life. In a radical reformatting that brings human and natural history closer, Tarde sees humans beginning to have an affinity with minerals and rocks. The two sciences that shape this experience, Tarde tells us, are chemistry and psychology: a coupling of matter and mind.

Our chemists, inspired perhaps by love and better instructed in the nature of affinities, force their way into the inner life of the molecules and reveal to us their desires, their ideas, and under a fallacious air of conformity, their individual physiognomy. While they thus construct for us the psychology of the atom, our psychologists explain to us the atomic theory of self.6 In Tarde’s theory novel, there is a happy ending with the rise of a new, posthuman society. While Tarde’s radical thought was the engine for what is essentially a work of fiction, parallels can be drawn between present day and the end of the nineteenth century, which saw the rise of the physical sciences and the nation state.

Now neoliberal globalisation between the two poles of so-called progress, science and the state, has pushed us to a time of ecological crisis. As we see in Deep Weather, this is not going to happen in one colossal, extraterrestrial, eschatological event but is already unfolding incrementally in the frontiers of environmental violence and climate change in the global south. In contemporary Bangladesh, like peasant activism in Egypt, environmental activism has a new political vitality outside the statist-capitalist apparatus. While Deep Weather is an ecopoetic meditation, Egyptian Chemistry is both polyvalent and essayistic in bringing together empirical research, videography, and ethnography to specific practices that break down the divisions between biological life and geological, chemical material – practices that are simultaneously counter-hegemonic. As in Tarde’s novel, addressing water molecules from the Nile is part of Biemann’s multiscalar project that shows our propensity for co-habiting with fluid matter.

Nabil Ahmed is a writer, artist and researcher, who teaches at London Metropolitan University. His work has been published in journals and books including Third Text (January 2013), and Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence (Routledge, 2014).

Notes 1

Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

2 Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea (Washington: Plutarch Press, 1997).

3 Ibid.

23

4

Shiv Visvanathan, ‘On the Annals of the Laboratory State’, in A. Nandy ed., Science, Hegemony and Violence (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988).

5 Ursula Biemann dir., Black Sea Files (2005).

6 Gabriel Tarde, Underground: Fragments of Future Histories, C. Brereton trans. (London: Duckworth & Co, 1905).

INTERNATIONAL NEW MEDIA GALLERY

24

25