Undead Matter #7 Life at the Edges of Shifting Rhythms
- 00:01 The Arctic: a place where things... gather
- 02:23 Shezad Dawood: Climate change, Greenland and layers, what's beneath the surface
- 02:43 Mark Nuttall: Understanding human, environment and non-human relations. Vulnerability and risk in relation to our surroundings
- 04:25 Geology and deep time in the discussions about nation-building
- 05:11 Maria Kreutzmann: the Mother of the ocean
- 06:56 On the egde of the glacier and the ablation zone. Cryoconite holes, dark matter
- 09:34 Local or transnational deposits. Migration over time
- 10:15 Dust
- 11:32 Emerging, gathering. Circularity of substances
- 12:22 The Mother of the ocean: fingers that turn into fish, seals and everything else thats alive in the ocean
- 13:16 The poetic end of the spectrum: transforming us
- 13:55 Time-scales
- 16:02 Warm events. A world that's turbulent and volatile
- 18:10 Nature: a world becoming, constantly in motion
- 18:51 A symphony of turbulence. Change and adaptation
- 20:53 Diversity of opinions, perspectives and understandings of Climate Change in Greenland
- 24:14 Mother of the ocean: sinking into the darkest part of the water
- 24:59 Self-sustainability and a greater deal of autonomy
- 28:27 At the bottom of the ocean
- 30:20 Future-making and the real nature of the environment
- 33:06 Social aspirations of Greenlandic people
- 36:13 Uranium mining, radioactive potential and The Lost City
- 43:12 Camp Century, sci-fi and imaginations in the subterranean
- 50:42 Indigenous understanding of time
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.
This podcast is part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.
Supported by the Centre for the GeoHumanities, Royal Holloway University of London and the European Research Council funded project, Think Deep.
Curated by Sophie J Williamson. Produced by Undead Matter. Sound by Either/Or Recordings. Editorial support: Roc Jiménez de Cisneros.
Photo: Close up image of a greenland shark taken at the floe edge of the Admiralty Inlet, Nunavut. By Hemming1952