Sala10: Ursula Biemann

Immersion…with ears wide open

In its many aspects (documentary, narrative, action), Acoustic Ocean offers us the wonder of the subaquatic universe in which a multitude of species communicate around the world. Thanks to the North Atlantic’s peculiar conditions of density and silence, it is possible to record the immense exchange of signals and responses that occur underwater. Ursula Biemann provides us with a glimpse of another world, one to which only surveillance devices at the service of submarine warfare used to have access. This “immersion,” serves as a “rhetorical tool” of a “fluid osmosis of environment by a participant-observer/auditor,”[1] to use Stefan Helmreich’s words.

The guide (a Sámi researcher who practices modern science from a non-Western perspective) lifts the veil on possibilities for the circulation of signs and affects, rhythms and calls that anthropocentrism has denied us. The evidence of submarine sociability challenges the definitions of human and animal formulated by Western culture: “in contrast to us humans […] the animal neither speaks nor responds […] its capacity to produce signs is foreign to language and limited or fixed by a program.”[2] This world reveals itself to us on the verge of its disappearance. As in other cases from the history of ethnology, a new linguistic and cultural community becomes known right at the moment when it is threatened with extinction.

The perspective shift explored in pieces such as Biemann’s is also expressed in the instability of their poetics and forms. Strategically, the artist’s projects combine documentary elements with poetic actions: scenes taken from scientific research archives join a performance on the seashore, suggesting a process derived from the anthropological participant-observer and the authority of intuition. Defining genres would be counterproductive when the goal is rather to challenge orders and hierarchies, whether of thought or production. In any case, as Donna Haraway argues, we require a new class of narratives in which humans no longer play the leading role, instead giving way to a sympoietics:

"We are at stake to each other. Unlike the dominant dramas of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are not the only important actors in the Chthulucene, with all other beings able simply to react. The order is reknitted: human beings are with and of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this earth are the main story."[3]

One of the virtues of Acoustic Ocean is to bring us face-to-face with a new wonder. It’s worth noting that confusing what we must learn and feel in this crisis of our economic and ecological system with the apocalypse is yet another anthropocentric gesture. Voices, rhythms and heartbeats go much further than the momentary reign of our species.

Cuauhtémoc Medina
 

Ursula Biemann (Switzerland, 1955)
 
Ursula Biemann is an artist, writer and video essayist based in Zurich, Switzerland. Her artistic practice is strongly research oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations where she investigates the political ecologies of forests, oil and water. Her video installations are exhibited worldwide in museums and International Art Biennials. She recently had a solo exhibition Savoirs indigènes-Fictions cosmologiques [Indigenous Knowledge-Cosmological Fictions] at MAMAC in Nice and published the online monograph Becoming Earth on her ecological video works and writing.