Undead Matter #7
Life at the Edges of Shifting Rhythms
Curated by Sophie J Williamson.
Undead Matter is an unfolding conversation about where life lies in the ever-turning matter of our universe, as it rhythmically resurfaces over millennia. In this episode, artist and filmmaker, Shezad Dawood speaks with social and geopolitical anthropologist Mark Nuttall, who’s work is embedded in circumpolar rural communities, tracing the entanglements between climate change, extractive industries and identity of place. They discuss the accumulated residues, ecological cosmologies and shifting futures that have emerged from the deepest corners of the oceans, the icy subsurface and geological entanglements of Greenland’s complex landscapes and the lives they hold.
Creation myths, told by Greenlandic storyteller Maria Kreutzmann, bubble up from the dark depths of the ocean and rub up against dramatic changes in the landscape throughout the past century. Dawood and Nuttall consider the differing life rhythms held in these lands; from the Greenlandic Shark, thought to live up to 500 years, to the rapid agricultural developments seen as warming temperatures creates abundant, fertile pastures.
Past sci-fi imaginaries of novel, icy frontiers reveal their contemporary reality as the abandoned subterranean Cold War military base of Camp Century surface through the thawing ice. Against a backdrop of modernisation and new extractive industries, they consider the differing perspectives of autonomy and sustainability in a rapidly shifting landscape, which is still imbued with ancient knowledges of kinship within these fragile ecologies, where life-that-thrives takes on different meanings and temporalities.
<p>Curated by Sophie J Williamson. Produced by Undead Matter. Sound by Either/Or Recordings. Editorial support: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros.</p> <p>Photo: Close up image of a greenland shark taken at the floe edge of the Admiralty Inlet, Nunavut. By Hemming1952 </p>
Sarah Nuttall
Over the past 10 years, South African scholar Sarah Nuttall's work has focused on post-colonial criticism, urban theory and literary and cultural studies, especially in relation to Africa and its diasporas. Her current area of interest revolves around water, heavy rainfall, flooding and hydrocolonialism, and how they intersect with materiality, time and daily life. But also around how water can be traced and analysed across works of literary fiction from the African continent. ‘Pluviality’, the umbrella term she coined for this purpose, serves as a conceptual framework and a methodological approach to her study of rain in an era of extreme climate emergency.
The slippery materiality of untraceable objects: from the arsenic poisoning the wells of Bangladesh as told by Nabil Ahmed, to Arie Altena's account of the superstition surrounding the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, or the bizarre biology of the vampire squid from hell in a passage of Vilém Flusser’s ‘Vampyroteuthis Infernalis’ read by AGF.
Nurturing the Ancient Undead
Undead Matter is an unfolding conversation about where life lies in the ever-turning matter of our universe, as it rhythmically resurfaces over millennia. In this new episode, artist, Oreet Ashery speaks with paleontologist Tori Herridge about discoveries in the permafrost, genetic legacies, cloning from the deep past, fertility and the unborn.