Forum on Border Topologies: Practices and Curation | Essay by Ursula Biemann

GeoHumanities

ISSN: 2373-566X (Print) 2373-5678 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rgeo20

Deep Weather Ursula Biemann To cite this article: Ursula Biemann (2016) Deep Weather, GeoHumanities, 2:2, 373-376, DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2016.1234339 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2016.1234339

Published online: 03 Nov 2016.

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FORUM ON BORDER TOPOLOGIES: PRACTICES AND CURATIONS

Deep Weather Ursula Biemann Zurich, Switzerland

When factoring climate change into spatial considerations, the concept of border might have to be entirely rethought. The forces that until recently were shaping the historical borders on earth are surpassed by infinitely larger, untamable ones that show no respect for human-made boundaries. How does a geocentric framing that remains so outrageously indifferent to political determination affect the topology of borders? If we have been critically thinking about border topologies in terms of their formative social and political histories, we now have to view them in much longer time frames and try to comprehend how the temporalities of the materials and natural conditions that constitute them move across the terrain and transform it in the process.

Post-Anthropocenic art operates on grounds that until recently have stood outside representation, moving on uncharted land or, more to the point, is itself exposed to geological forces. Davis and Turpin (2015) wrote in their introduction to Art in the Anthropocene, “Becoming-geological undoes aesthetic sensibilities and ungrounds political commitments” (3). In other words, the rapid transformation of our physical environment is also urging us to find new textual and aesthetic modes of addressing and perceiving it. It is under these considerations that I’d like to review two remote locations I visited during field trips on opposite sides of the world featuring distinct moving topographies, migrating terrains. Located in frontier spaces, their unstable properties are as much due to their physical vagueness as to the narratives that have attempted to grasp them. The appearance of these places in a recent video essay Deep Weather (2013) recognizes them as bounded, yet shifting, forms in which time and becoming occurs.

First, the scarred earth and sulfuric clouds in northern Alberta unfold a highly stratified temporal composition: the geological time of fossil deposits in the Canadian tar sands, the mythic time of First Nation communities whose decisions take into account the well-being of the next seven generations, the local overuse of seasonal freshwater for large-scale tar extraction, the financial fluctuations of global commodity markets.1 The translation between these incongruent

GeoHumanities, 2(2) 2016, 373–376 © Copyright 2016 by American Association of Geographers.

Initial submission, March 2016; revised submission, March 2016; final acceptance, March 2016.

Published by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

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FIGURE 1 Tar sand fields in Alberta, Canada. Video still from Deep Weather. (Color figure available online.)

tempi relentlessly grinds against each other. The second scene in Deep Weather involves masses of people stemming rising sea levels in the Ganges delta. The specificity of a place and the geologic and atmospheric forces that violently engage it are generating a dynamic that is increasingly out of sync. As Chambers (2015) recently wrote in his beautiful book on borders, “Suspended in a worldly network, the dense immediacy of locality and the powerful resonance of a planetary grammar are compounded in an uneven, even unstable, certainly inconclusive, mix” (6). On these shifting grounds, a videographic perspective cannot possibly be one of stability and explanation. Rather, language, image, and thought have to be mobilized so as to disable the fiction of a fixed sense of dwelling. The moving images of vast landscapes are imbued with a hauntingly physical voice, creating an unsettling incongruence. Following a cyclone that roared over Bangladesh, the video voice-over whispers, “Fluid lands moved further East and large chunks broke off, triggering uncertainty about a transforming living space where land is little more than a fluctuating, mobile mass.” As land that defies the geometry of absolute space, the India–Bangladesh boundary running through the mighty river delta is in need to be continuously redefined. With the rising sea, arable and urban space is obviously shrinking. The narrative takes up the foreboding calamity of statelessness that gradually sprawls over all continents and seven seas and turns it into an opportunity to recognize water as the territory of citizenship. Here, the extended form of citizenship isn’t bound to specific terrestrial definitions but to planet earth with its expanding oceans.

The two images attendant to this text address planetary border topologies. The first one speaks of the “Carbon Geologies” of the tar sands in the midst of the boreal forests of northern Canada (Figure 1), the second of the “Hydrogeographies” of the near-permanently floodthreatened Bangladesh (Figure 2)—two remote and simultaneously occurring scenes connected

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DEEP WEATHER

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FIGURE 2 Embankment building in the delta of Bangladesh. Video still from Deep Weather. (Color figure available online.)

through their atmospheric chemistry. The linking of these two landscapes is pursued through two narratives, one about oil, the other about water—vital “ur-liquids” that form the undercurrents of all narrations as they are activating profound changes in the planetary ecology.

Set in times of epic geological, chemical, and hydrological disorder, Deep Weather engages the Earth as a closed system. Climate change, exasperated by projects such as the Canadian tar sands, puts the life of large world populations in danger. Melting Himalayan ice fields, rising planetary sea levels and extreme weather events increasingly impose an amphibian lifestyle on the Bangladeshi population. Gigantic efforts are made by the community to build protective mud embankments. Hands-on work by thousands is what climate change will mean for most people in the deltas of the Global South. These are the measures taken by populations who progressively have to live on water when large parts of the land will be submerged.

These planetary relations are of a magnitude that is hard to grasp, all the more as the most significant chemical processes are occurring between locations and invisible to our eyes. Morton (2013) spoke of global warming as a hyperobject—a very large, diffused object that is permanently present but not localized in a material sense. We cannot perceive it as a whole; all we ever see are its footprints. Because global warming occurs in much vaster temporalities, it phases in and out of the shorter human time frame of perception. That, said Morton, is how it withdraws from our visibility. From our mortal, earthbound standpoint, the phenomenon is partially eclipsed. There are gaps in our cognition that need to be breached. How can we make the hyperobject accessible? Art can give some entry points. Perhaps art can play a role in conveying the immaterial and somewhat spectral nature of climate change, for instance by bringing remote and apparently unrelated locations to interact on the same visual plane. Our imaginary capacity is called for significant expansion at this time. To this effect, Deep Weather strives to thicken the

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understanding of these geographies by reaching deep into the interior of the Earth, down to Cambrian layers of carbon deposits, and extending a hundred miles into the atmosphere where particles circulate through rivers in the sky. Such border topologies are three-dimensional, constantly recomposing, exhalable, but no longer omitted. The science-fictional voice-over whispered in the wind activates a time-space that exceeds the localized physical and political reality of borders to plunge into a temporality of deep time where we have to index ourselves anew.

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NOTE 1.

I am grateful to have been invited to visit the tar sands in the context of the Petrocultures conference held at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, published online in special issue 2012 (3–2) of Imaginations, guest edited by Sheena Wilson and Andrew Pendakis.

REFERENCES Chambers, I. 2015. Location, borders and beyond. Naples: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Davis, H., and E. Turpin. 2015. Art & death: Lives between the fifth assessment & the sixth extinction in art in the Anthropocene—Encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies. London: Open Humanities Press.

Morton, T. 2013. Hyperobjects, philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

URSULA BIEMANN is an artist, writer, and video essayist based in Zurich, Switzerland. E-mail: ursula@geobodies.org.

Her interests include human–earth relations and the ecologies of oil, ice, forests, and water.