AFTER US, THE FLOOD. THE GLOBAL WATER GRAB AND ITS ADVERSARIES
Elena Sorokina
Requiem for Fossil Fuels
Starting from the (in)famous Northern river reversal project, designed to turn the flow of Siberian rivers from the Arctic Ocean southwards, my presentation will discuss the ecology of oil and water through several examples. Among them the sci-fi novel by Tobias S. Buckell Arctic Rising (2012) and his scenario of “oil-rush” on the post-global warming Arctic seabed, the project “Petroliana” I organized in
Moscow (2007) and the topics at its core – “extractivism”, oil spills and the oil-related water damage, oil rigs as sci-fi water architecture and others. Ultimately, I will present an excerpt of the “Requiem for Fossil Fuels” by Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger (O+A), composed by “extracting” voices of our electric
culture – helicopters, jets, traffic, busses, horns, train wheels, footsteps of commuters, sirens – and organising them as music.
Elena Sorokina is a Russian-born, Paris based curator and art historian, currently working as curatorial adviser for Documenta 14 in Athens/Kassel.
Discussion
Maren Richter – The Island is What the Sea Surrounds…
Based on two curatorial projects – the Maldives Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennial and a current project in Malta which deals with political, economic and ecological parameters of “islandness” in the Mediterranean Sea – the presentation exemplifies the challenges of rising sea levels, the logic of rapidly growing commodification of islands and the sea as a highly politicized battlefield through the lens of tangible limitations of territorial thinking. “The island is what the sea surrounds…”, a quote by Gilles Deleuze from his early essay “Desert Islands”, tries to offer new ecologies of thinking “the unterritorialized” and the topology of the de-colonized and the unfixed as a model of possible radical alternatives. Both projects intend to take a deeper look into modes of address and spaces for “Action” beyond representation.
Maren Richter is a curator, art critic and researcher based in Austria. She co-initiated the collaborative project “Grammar of Urgencies” currently researching on “Fleeting Territories”, and she is the curator of ECoC Valletta 2018 in Malta.
More information: Kunst Haus Wien
