ARMIN LINKE - PROSPECTING OCEAN Commissioned and produced by TBA21–Academy Curated by Stefanie Hessler
TBA21–Academy is proud to present its Armin Linke Prospecting Ocean attempts to create a first major research commission, conceived Prospecting Ocean , 2018 new visualization to frame the complex and realized over three years by the artist Main film, two-channel video installation, kaleidoscopic images that are connected and fellow of The Current Armin Linke. color, sound, ca 56 min with the Anthropocene into a linear narrative Lectures, two-channel video installation, essay. The work aims at understanding color, sound, 240 min and possibly creating new solutions to design the future. Exemplary issues are the Working through photography and acidification of the ocean, the implication of filmmaking, Armin Linke looks at the the usage of fertilizers, the practice of ice institutional infrastructures, decision drilling to get information on the history of processes, and sites of power hierarchies, climate, ocean current measurement and in many cases through an investigation modeling, negotiations on new legislations of the archive and of the conditions and that relate to the ocean boundaries and possibilities of the media itself. regulations, and eventually economical practices like oil and mineral drilling, fisheries, issues related to vessel transport, and ice melting in the Arctic region.
Armin Linke investigates international Camera: Armin Linke, Giulia Bruno regulations and laws related to the seabed Sound and sound postproduction: and the rising sea levels. By combining Giuseppe Ielasi, Renato Rinaldi film, photography, documentation, and Editing: Giulia Bruno, Giuseppe Ielasi interviews, he has selected various institutions, scientists and local agents, observing the different procedures, negotiations, interconnections that their activities implicate. Focusing on a selection of seminal conferences, Linke uses a combination of filmic material gathered, amongst other, from the 22nd Session of the International Seabed Authority in Kingston, Jamaica, as well as Committee on International Law and Sea Level Rise, Johannesburg/Sandton, South Africa. The documentation of the conferences will be combined with footage gathered in the field on various research trips investigating similar themes, which feed back into these conferences.
For the premiere of Prospecting Ocean , Drawing upon rare footage of the deep- Linke’s Prospecting Ocean presents a rich Armin Linke and TBA21–Academy joined sea and interviews with leading scientists, choreography of newly filmed footage and forces with the Istituto di Scienze policymakers, legal experts, and activists, archival materials exhibited in the former Marine (CNR-ISMAR) and developed the project scrutinizes the aesthetics of headquarters and laboratory spaces of an investigative exhibition, presented at technoscientific apparatuses and grapples CNR-ISMAR, including several multi- ISMAR’s former offices and laboratories in with the tension between ecological channel video installations and a new Venice in summer 2018. protection of our oceans and political and series of photographs. A montage of rarely economic exploitation. seen scientific footage of the ocean floor— captured by remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROV) at a depth of up to 5,000 meters—visually juxtaposes the “natural” seabed with the machinery used to extract specimen for research and deep-sea minerals for industrial use. Next to these highly detached images of tools and clinical incisions in the seabed, the exhibition presents imagery filmed at assemblies at the UN, in international law conferences, at marine research centers, and at sites endangered by sea level rise and now also seabed mining in Papua New Guinea.
Linke exposes submarine and terrestrial At CNR-ISMAR, the footage filmed by Prospecting Ocean also features a selection sites that are commonly invisible and Linke and his team is presented alongside of primary documents and books from the accesses the meetings of decision behind-the-scenes interviews of leading CNR-ISMAR historical library selected by makers that are usually closed off to the biologists, geologists, and policymakers, the institute’s scientists and critical texts public. Scrutinizing the infrastructural as well as footage of activist movements analyzing the legal, political, and economic apparatuses administrating the seabed, in Papua New Guinea, inviting the viewer infrastructures presiding over the allocation Linke deconstructs the idea of a marine- to consider the implications of oceanic of ocean resources. Taken together, the based blue economy and policy commonly excavations on both the environment project scrutinizes the administration of supported by governments. and communities. Linke lays bare an the oceans and exposes the simultaneous intricate network of dynamics, dissecting fascination with and alienation from how information is negotiated between technologies that map, visualize, and scientific, legal, and economic entities and exploit resources in the sea. institutions, on both local and international levels. Curator and text: Stefanie Hessler
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00 Armin Linke’s film Prospecting Ocean Mapping out the history of international (2018) is the centerpiece of his three-year regulatory systems and their contemporary research commission. Accompanied by a applications, Linke assembled interviews monitor with commentaries by scientists, with legal experts with scenes from the legal experts, and activists, the film United Nations conference on the future begins with abstract imagery captured of the oceans. The presence of Fiji, viewed at night at the Norwegian University here indirectly via a recording screen, of Science and Technology (NTNU) in grants a first glimpse into the diverging Trondheim. The scenes oscillate between stakes of oceanic stewardship and a distant, mediatized gaze and scientific international extraction agendas. fascination, focusing on technological devices employed to gauge and map subaquatic depths that remain invisible to the bare eye. The use of the technologies developed and tested here is mediated by legislation intended to reconcile the conflicting interests of scientific exploration, commercial extraction, and environmental protection.
00 Also included are filmed interviews The film ends with scenes filmed by Linke with scientists such as Ann Vanreusel, and his team in Papua New Guinea, where head of the Marine Biology Research mining operations in national waters are Group at Ghent University, and Antje about to commence, instigated by the Boetius, professor of geomicrobiology international company Nautilus Minerals at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Inc. The camera captures images of Microbiology at the University of Bremen. quotidian life in proximity to the oceans These researchers grant insights into the and local activist groups concerned with environmental implications of seabed the negative ecological, societal, and mining, technological devices applied economic impacts of deep-sea mining. in mineral extraction, and the role that These scenes raise questions regarding hydrothermal vents play in biodiversity and self-determination and foreign dependency the health of ecosystems. of economically deprived regions such as Papua New Guinea, pointing to the distributed complex of infrastructural and legal systems that the architect and researcher Keller Easterling has called “extrastatecraft.”
01 In the staircase leading to the second The invisible and the subvisible have part of the exhibition, a six-channel sound inspired scientists to use the language of installation, conceived by Giuseppe Ielasi, science fiction and extraterrestriality to with the voice of the anthropologist Stefan discuss these novel and strange microbial Helmreich of Massachusetts Institute of creatures. Helmreich considers different Technology (MIT) in Cambridge considers scales, from the microscopic and intimately shifting relationships between the natural bodily to planetary interconnected and cultural worlds. Helmreich discusses ecosystems. At the same time these the reconfigurations of biological categories findings have opened up a new frontier for as scientists discovered hydrothermal prospecting, which reinstalls inequalities vents and deep-sea bacteria in the 1970s. underwritten by long histories of the These novel findings urged them to ask extraction of minerals from indigenous fundamental questions regarding what lands. constitutes an organism and how life can evolve in such extreme conditions.
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