Jakob Kudsk Steensen, ‘Primal Tourism’ (excerpt) 2016
Primal Tourism: Tour (2016), 10min. 48sec. is a 360 virtual reality video, that takes you on a first person journey through the imagined future landscape of Borabora developed by Jakob Kudsk Steensen. In the work, only ambiance sound effects are heard such as wind, leaves moving in the wind, water flowing and the eerie sound of an empty airport. As a virtual tourist experiencing the work, you will journey from subaquatic landscapes to mountaintops and abandoned future trashy tourist combined with primal lush tropical landscapes. As the work emphasizes the natural elements, experiencing the tour in VR delivers a corporal way of relating to human influences on landscapes
21 young people from across the United States have filed a landmark constitutional climate change lawsuit against the federal government in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon. Also acting as a Plaintiff is world-renowned climate scientist Dr. James E. Hansen, serving as guardian for future generations and his granddaughter. The Complaint asserts that, in causing climate change, the federal government has violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, property, as well as failed to protect essential public trust resources.
The Complaint alleges the Federal Government is violating the youth’s constitutional rights by promoting the development and use of fossil fuels. These young Plaintiffs are challenging the federal government’s national fossil fuel programs, as well as the proposed Jordan Cove LNG export terminal in Coos Bay, OR. Plaintiffs seek to hold President Obama and various federal agencies responsible for continued fossil fuel exploitation. The Federal Government has known for decades that fossil fuels are destroying the climate system. No less important than in the Civil Rights cases, Plaintiffs seek a court order requiring the President to immediately implement a national plan to decrease atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (“CO2”) to a safe level: 350 ppm by the year 2100.
Nicholas Mangan, Nauru - Notes From A Cretaceous World, 2009 - 2010
HD video, Colour, sound, 14:50
Extract from narration:
It was once believed that the vast Nauruan wealth was afforded by the mining of ancient bird excretions which had had built up over millennia; a 20th century alchemy, by which excrement could be turned into gold.
A gigantic geometric tower evolved as the culmination of trading their island’s mined interior. Unaccustomed to the vast horizontal plains of their newly adopted home in Melbourne Australia, they stock-piled the land they had acquired in trade - vertically. Three large pinnacle rocks were hauled across the deeps of the Pacific from their native island, Nauru. The pinnacles were to adorn the tower's entry court as a symbol of prosperity.
It was assumed that the rocks had been formed by a build-up of fossilized bird excrement. Having discolored and blackened due to oxidization, their exposure to a foreign climate was evident. It was assumed they were old, almost ancient. They bore strange marine fossils and coral crustaceans. In the year 2003; after almost 4 decades, the ancient pinnacles were chained up and torn from their tiled pedestals; banished - never to return.
This empire was collapsing. The Nauruan flagship was sinking. The once prosperous island nation had been fleeced, depleted and drained. Instability within the Nauruan government aided by carpet-baggers and beach-combers had left the empire high and dry.
Long ago, a rock was taken from the island. It was perhaps this displacement that set the course for a curse that would plague the island for decades to come. The rock in question, originally believed to be petrified wood, was by chance, revealed to possess a magic dust. It was said that this dust could make a desert bloom like a rose, like a classic treasure island fable, buried under the once tropical palm treed forest of Nauru lay a treasure. It was the soil itself.
Daniel Steegmann Mangrane, Teque-teque, 2010
monochannel video, color, sound.
0'38" (on suspended screen 115 x 92 cm)
A single horizontal pan in the rainforest and a teque-teque bird singing is pieced for an exploration of the structure of the medium and its physicality presence.
Each teque-teque trill the image changes direction, turns, inverts flips or changes its focus, making along the 38" of the video all the possible combinations.
The work comes accompanied with a small text in the press release about the bird teque-teque with a geometric drawing on it (see below). The text reads:
"Also known as sebinho, ferrerinho or marrequinha, the Teque-teque is an insectivorous bird typical of the Atlantic Forest of Brazil Orinetal. Is a small bird (9cm.) easily recognizable by the yellow node in the chest, head bluish gray with yellow spots in the temples. Hunting invertebrates at the bottom of the treetops, downs to 1 meter above the soil. Like his fellow birds, feeds on small fruits and catch insects in midair. builds a wisted nest hunging on the tips of the branches (pendular) of about 30 cm. Bird of light habits, almost never stands still. Endangered."
‘FOREST LAW’ 2014
Ursula Biemann in collaboration with Paula Tavares
This collaborative project draws from research carried out by the pair in the oil-and-mining frontier in the Ecuadorian Amazon— one of the most biodiverse and mineral-rich regions on Earth, currently under pressure from the dramatic expansion of large-scale extraction activities. At the heart of Forest Law is a series of landmark legal cases that bring the forest to court and plead for the rights of nature. One particularly paradigmatic trial that has recently been won by the indigenous people of Sarayuku based on their cosmology of the living forest.
The project emerges from dialogues—between us and our practices, the camera and the forest, and, most importantly, ourselves and the many people whom we encountered while traveling through Amazonia in November 2013.
Forest Law is a synchronized video projection (42 min.) shot with two cameras, a photo-text assemblage unfolding the background to these cases, and an artist book. Taken together, the collection of personal testimonies and factual evidence presented here expose the multiple dimensions of the tropical forest as a physical, legal, and cosmological entity.
Forest Law has been realized in a close reading of Michel Serres “The Natural Contract”.
‘In the exhibition catalog the filmmaker [Werner Herzog’ instructively quotes the Romantic German painter Caspar David Friedrich, “I have to morph into a union with the clouds and rocks, in order to be what I am.” It is this action of morphing that I want to call psychologizing the landscape. But I might venture further that to psychologize the landscape reverses Friedrich’s dictum, in that the landscape only becomes what it is when it morphs with us, becoming a zone for human transaction. This is not simply a method for anthropomorphizing the landscape, it is an attempt to delineate a way that landscape might be saved from its own indifference, by absorbing our psychology to create something like a world legible to human understanding. It is through a type of psychology which does not simply analyze a subject (landscape) but injects it with a human psyche, that a pulse returns to our image of landscape.’
From ‘Earth Without Aura: Notes on the Psychology of Contemporary Landscape’ By Zachary Cahill for Mousse Magazine
Jonathas knows no other place than the Amazon, where he lives and works with his family. As a living being with its own will, the jungle has a fascinating attraction for tourists and also forms a seductive threat for Jonathas. Enchanting low-budget debut.
John Skoog, Shadowland (stills), 2014
16mm to HD-Video, stereo sound
15’15”
‘As its point of departure, [Shadowland] takes locations that in some way or another have been prominent in certain early Hollywood films as places of otherness or, to put it differently, places that have been used as stand-ins for other parts of the world. We see mostly depopulated or deserted landscapes, sceneries shot from vast vistas, images of seascapes and geological formations. The sound work is a dense mix of field recordings, partly voices of people telling stories about the places depicted as well as some sounds from the original films.
Shot in the vicinity of Los Angeles – on grainy black and white 16 mm film stock, »Shadowland« is a subtle, yet forceful new addition to the already impressive filmography of this emerging major filmmaker.
In 2013, at the suggestion of oceanographer Charles Moore, geologist Patricia Corcoran and artist Kelly Jazvac travelled to Kamilo Beach, Hawaii to study a new stone formation. What they found was a new substance that was a mix of melted plastic and natural materials such as coral, sand, wood and volcanic rock. They called the stones “Plastiglomerate” and a co-authored manuscript of their findings can be found here:http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/24/6/article/i1052-5173-24-6-4.htm
Plastiglomerate has been acknowledged by key researchers as potential evidence of the Anthropocene era. Press can be found here:http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/science/earth/future-fossils-plastic-stone.html?_r=0
FOREST retreat by Uhlik Architekti, České Budějovice, Czech Republic
This hideaway located in the countryside was constructed from wood from a nearby forest and local sources from local craftsmen. Resting freely on boulders with a stern raised on a huge boulder, the enclosed black pavilion made of charred wood contains one interconnected multi-functional room with standing space, a view, seating benches, and a double bed.
“It’s a land that God, if he exists has - has created in anger. It’s the only land where - where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at - at what’s around us there - there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of… overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle - Uh, we in comparison to that enormous articulation - we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban… novel… a cheap novel.”
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