TO LIKE, SYNC, WITH THIS ECOLOGY ONE LAST TIME

Nature as Infrastructure is a virtual program curated by the Copenhagen-based artist collective The Winter Office (TWO) and organised within the frame of Manifesta 13 – Les Parallèles du Sud, Marseille, 2020 at the invitation of the French/Portugese artist, Wilfrid Almendra and through a network of generous collaborations and partnerships which is becoming a characteristic of the group’s ongoing exhibition and program formats. Nature as Infrastructure has an impressive line-up of works, talks, screenings and book launches, and the group has, in my opinion, managed to create a feeling of a biennial within this year’s Manifesta biennial. Check it out on www.bruisemagazine.com before the various links expire, and read about my encounter with outer space; interspecies relationships; colonized subjecthood; and the mineral, mental, intellectual, bodily and data extraction-informing-amongst many other global crises, in the review below.

The Winter Office opened their program with the release of a video titled G.R.A.C.E. (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment). This video presents a data visualization model of the Earth, which was taken from readings by the twin satellites (of the same name) that orbited space from 2002-2017.

This blue, yellow, and red colored Earth is what scientists in various fields call a geoid, a ‘mathematical’ model, which is spinning in space like an ugly potato. It’s not the blue marvel planetary simulation of Earth’s orbit we all have in our minds. G.R.A.C.E was part of a joint mission by NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), which not only took detailed measurements of Earth's gravitational field to create this image of Earth, but also further developed the science for accurately measuring changes in the Earth’s surface. The Winter Office used the image in the tradition of ready-made films, courtesy of the European Space Agency.

The work, as a climate fiction of sorts, is accompanied by a voiceover from a sentient algorithm or AI that talks to us soothingly – similar in tone to an instructor of a yoga class. But while yoga classes relax or enlighten you, G.R.A.C.E. has the opposite effect. The image may look nice, it may sound nice, but the story told in this work of art is far beyond ‘nice’.

The Winter Office, G.R.A.C.E. (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment). Video still.

While the model spins and spins, the voice tells me how I have been living with an image of the Earth that compares ‘to a fairytale read to me in my youth’. An image I never thought to question, is suddenly interrogated:

“The surface of the Earth is not smooth, not regular, such as the perfect globe you have always seen. This image does not tell you about the inevitable loss after the rising sea levels. Things are not what they seem. Perhaps that is the issue of our time? [Fake news and] fairy tales.” (Quoted freely after memory, except “fake news” which is an addition by me).

The algorithm(s) - says this model “makes visible what your carbon-based eyes are unable to apprehend”, and here I am sincerely afraid that we are also cognitively incapable and unwilling to fully comprehend the impending climate crisis. It becomes too abstract and too scary, especially when we have to watch from home, alone, and isolated in our own post-quarantine enclosures, longing for an image that perhaps was never there.

I will dive further into the feelings of loneliness and despair as the program starts to shed light on our relationship to nature, but first I take a more “down-to-earth” look into it with a series of works dealing with extraction.

THE ANTILIBRARY

On the 28th of November, from Brooklyn, New York, the head of The Antilibrary, Oscar Salguero hosted a zoom book review of Cerro Point Blanco by Lehman Brothers. Salguero took us carefully through each chapter, while also screening a video work by The Lehman Brothers.

From the start he intermingles both the content of the book with his own thoughts on our resource-based economy: “Extraction is feeding a capitalistic fantasy, saying there is always more, more land, more people, more things, the pool of resources is endless,” Salguero says. “There is, however, a finite dimension to the world plus there is something called entanglement. Whatever we do will affect our lives and everyone else’s. If we keep harvesting without giving anything back – we will run out.”

The Antilibrary on Cerro Point Blaco by Lehman Brothers. Video still.

While aesthetically connecting the dots of the Capitalocene, the whale-killing harpoon, outer space, cyberspace, slavery, extractivism, titanium, candlepower and Melville, Salguero (through his shared-screen) frames the bulk of his presentation through a statement by the authors Hugo Hopping and Christopher Sand-Iversen in the last chapter of the book, when they propose that “Art is the Anthropocene and the Anthropocene is Art”. Extraction is a product of capitalism and colonialism, whether it is a matter of biological, mineral, intellectual or data extraction.

Bringing to light our own responsibility between art and an entire geological period produces a rift for how we define ourselves within this period, but it also situates us within it, and perhaps from that we can start transforming in a practical and regenerative direction.

The final sentence of the book, which Salguero quotes from the same authors, frames essentially what the Nature as Infrastructure program offers:

“To curate artistic practices that attempt to render the challenges of the near-future, is to engage in developing a way forward that does not lead to us stepping over the brink of the guano-slathered cliff into the depths of the ocean, but to looking at as much of the whole as is humanly possible, a purview that can only widen through a commonality of aesthetic (self-)activity practiced from the bottom up – now as the realization falls upon us...” In connection to this sentence, the final judgment of Salguero is: “Yes, paper is also an extraction exercise and it does take resources, but it also gives back by creating a rupture in your mind. Writing and publishing a book is giving a gift of information, provocation, and inspiration. Cerro Point Blanco is not just another book – it is more of a wake-up call!”

Searching for Nigel

Searching for Nigel is a 33-minute video by Filip Vest about falling in love with someone who is unable to reciprocate. The work considers the implications of running out of time, feeling caged and getting lost in translation. With humor we meet a parrot trying to communicate with the avatar Alexa, and a bird communicating on Skype. The work is brilliant because it counteracts the Anthropocentric worldview of humans feeling superior to other animals. The protagonist in the work is a bird called Nigel, who fell in love with a decoy in the Mana Islands, fabricated and placed there by humans to attract a richer bird community over time:

We found a pattern

We isolated you from the algorithm

We played your favorite songs

We measured the frequencies

And then we found you

You had settled with your new concrete partner

This final sentence is beautiful and must, in Nigel’s case, be taken quite literally since the bird he fell in love with, was casted in concrete.

Filip Vest, Searching for Nigel. Video still.

Filip Vest is not depicting the true story from the Mana Islands as a documentary, but rather he takes inspiration from Nigel to reflect upon the joy and sorrow, happiness and grief that is found where beings meet and co-habit and relationships end. In the video we see a series of interviews with people explaining how they found and lost former lovers. “I don’t want to put you in a cage,” a man says to the man who left him, “I have been in a cage myself all my life and I do not wish for anyone to experience that''. Another interviewee describes their fleeting romance as a “tourist in your life, there to visit you intensely, but then they leave and you never see them again”.

An animated bird from a children’s movie also offers some insight on love; complaining about his lover who is a straw he says: “She is always flirting with the wind, I love travelling so my wife consequently should love traveling also”, followed by the narrator’s voice: “The straw shook her head, she was so attached to her home”. A very subtle expression of different beings’ different needs, one needs the earth, and another needs the air.

While at times Filip Vest’s contribution to the climate crisis may seem tenuous, feelings of loss and loneliness are inescapable as we reformulate our relationship to nature. I believe it is important to incorporate these nuances into building an affective climate art history.

We’re all Motherfuckers

This video by the young Swedish artist, Madeleine Andersson, made me send her a marry-me request on Instagram. I saw it the same day as Greta Thunberg’s movie entered the cinemas, and there are obvious similarities between these two angry Swedish girls, but the way Andersson delivers her 40 minutes punch line after punch line is just breathtaking.

On the visual side, the artist starts out by acting as one big plastic island in the sea, before she goes on to wearing a camouflage suit in the forest. Her use of self-staging frames is interesting because it, on the one hand, mirrors our contemporary SoMe generation while at the other hand, suggests a much less egoistic message. In another scene, the artist is pissed off after reading the Swedish government’s report on the 16 goals to reach before 2020. Realizing that only one out of the 16 goals to protect the environment has been reached at the time the video is filmed (2018/2020), an irate Andersson starts imitating the government’s incompetence. “It’s like one big fuck finger to the environment. Fuck you fungi, fuck you root, fuck you bird, fuck you deer, and FUCK THAT TREE in particular”. With her tragic melancholic approach, she underlines the absurdity in the lack of action.

My favorite scene is the one where she is desperately trying to bring back the seawater to the beach, completely incapable of comprehending the natural rhythm of the waves rolling back and forth, or perhaps just in denial, refusing to let it be… It feels like an appropriate image of how climate justice fighters, like Thunberg for example, keep trying to push things in the right direction, only to experience increased resistance and decline in any hope of saving humanity. But the scene also reminds me of Astrida Neimanis’ poetic take on exhaustion and rest, comparing our physical and mental cycles with the tide. We all go through ebbs and flows, sometimes we need to step up, at other times, withdraw, all depending on our own capacity as well as action toward our common crises.

But what happens as we get ourselves questioned from the perspective of the non-human and whose agenda becomes so apparent it shows us that our treatment of nature is itself in crisis. Hence, a tree, a speaking living and non-living one brought to you by a new project called Areyouready.tv.

Are you ready Television?

A tree has been soaked in the philosophy of Wittgenstein for decades, learning a new language to be able to speak with humans. In the online TV-channel, areyouready.tv, we follow the conversation between Wittgenstein’s philosophy, the tree and the two artists behind the project, Gitte Sætre and Frans Jacobi. Episode 1: The Resurrection was inaugurated both on areyouready.tv and on bruisemagazine.com and was served to us with the intention to capture our own engagement with our own treatment of nature via the new challenges brought on by the climate crisis. In their introduction to the episode, provided in a separate video, the artists say: “These days we're experiencing a breakdown of our way of thinking, our language and systems are falling apart […] Being out of control in the communication with nature, fosters a big confusion and requires a new learning, a new language”.

This identification with a tree seeking to learn a new language reminds me of Shahrnush Parsipur’s book Women without Men, in which a woman decides to plant herself in the garden as a tree. What may seem odd or fantasy-like, makes perfect sense in the story, and I have to admit that if I could, I would probably also every now and then like to become a tree. Especially for the sake of pacing down, grounding instead of running, collaborating instead of competing, and as trees become part of a root network where everyone takes care of each other, through the sharing of the resources available.

Areyouready.tv, Episode 1: The Resurrection. Video still.

The issue today isn’t whether we are all in the same boat (since we are clearly not) but the question must rather become a matter of collaboration in the building process of all the boats we need to build, if we shall have a fair chance of staying afloat in time for what is yet to come. This is at least how I understand ‘nature as infrastructure’ in a world on the edge of collapse.

Better late than never, one might say: if we are already to realize that we are all motherfuckers, engaging in processes of extraction, in love with fairy tales and fake news, we must reconsider this entire year as our first ‘last call’. I am sure that most of us have by now come to realize that humans can neither be isolated from nor survive without other animals, first of all because we are already entangled as interdependent species. The intersection between bats, minks and humans is just the most recent example. Another is the human-led mass extinction of other species and extreme loss of biodiversity, threatening our entire ecosystem to collapse. What I get from following Nature as Infrastructure is the simple laws of connectedness and entanglement that exists not only between different species but also between different humans, cultures, catastrophes as well as solutions.

In the beginning of this article, I wrote that the experience of G.R.A.C.E. did not feel comfortable, rather quite frightening, but I now realize that the reason for this, may be that I am still adapting to a new truth, where comfort and discomfort must have new connotations. Perhaps we have reached a point where the comfort we used to believe was a right of ours, is no longer the right thing to do. Vice versa the feeling of discomfort should be what drives us to change, but first of all we must accept the uncomfortable truth and “stay with the trouble” as Donna Haraway famously poses it.

I am truly grateful that a collective and platform like The Winter Office exists and the way they have been constructing this Manifesta program has been an overwhelming experience of food for thought.

I sincerely hope that the work of all the artists included will reach way beyond Marseille and Copenhagen through Bruisemagazine.com and create waves of empowerment to all Earthlings united by a shared belief in life and the will and courage to give something back.

About Nature as Infrastructure
The collaboration with The Winter Office was originally intended as a physical exhibition hosted through local exhibition partners of Manifesta 13, Adélaïde and Atlantis Lumière, but due to Covid-19 lockdown mandated by the French Government the exhibition was reorganized via the new online magazine, Bruise. Thereby it has been accessible to everyone from home since November 14th and will conclude on December 12th 2020, where some content from the program will continue to be published by Bruise and translated or subtitled in French. Since all works have not been available at the same time, this review gathers impressions from the first half of the duration of the show. Nature as Infrastructure encapsulates the research interests and theoretical underpinnings of The Winter Office, focusing primarily on the relationship between nature, humans and the urban environment. It is important to mention that Bruise Magazine, where the program is organized, is a new publishing project of the Marseille-based art center, Triangle France – Astérides an art center in Marseille that is part of partnership with Wilfrid Almendra, Adelaide, Atlantis Lumière, and SixtyEight Art Institute, and all of which are directly responsible for in bringing The Winter Office to Manifesta 13 – Les Parallèles du Sud, Marseille, France.

The Winter Office “Nature as Infrastructure”
At Bruisemagazine.com on view till 12 December, 2020.

Cover photo: Rewildering Holographic Weeds by The Winter Office. The title is a quote from the video We’re All Motherfuckers by Madeleine Andersson.

This essay is part of an initiative to foster Danish and English Language critical writings from a range of new talents across the visual arts; and as a partnership between I DO ART and SixtyEight Art Institute.