Deposing Geoengineering
Looking at the waters and colonial memories of the Limmat and Lögde Rivers so to explore transdisciplinary observation as alternative form to geoengineering
Foto por Luis Berríos Negrón.
Deposing Geoengineering: looking at the waters and colonial memories of the Limmat and Lögde Rivers so to explore transdisciplinary observation as alternative form to geoengineering
In 2021, by invitation of the Transdisciplinarity Programme at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste / Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Deposing Geoengineering became a two-part, lecture- and action-based seminar. The first session took place in Zurich, Switzerland during the Fall of 2021, and the second session in the Västerboten region of Northern Sweden during the Spring of 2022.
Geoengineering today refers to vast, scaleless technoscientific solutions for global warming mitigation (Crutzen 2002). Its history and current development points to unwitting exacerbations of the necropolitics (Mbembe 2019) of colonial memory (Berríos-Negrón 2019) and of climate injustice (TJ Demos 2017, Kolbert 2021) that profoundly ignore the imperative of biodiversity (Isbell 2015).
These concerns over geoengineering, ie. the impact of its logic and implementation, were presented to a diverse group of students of said Transdisciplinarity arts programme at the ZHdK in Zürich. That lecture-based presentation was then set in contrast to decolonial research of colonial memory and phenomenotechnics as cultural boundary objects (Star 1984), while considering, listening-to, if embodying and giving voice to river water as living being (Schauberger qua Alexandersson 1990, Neimanis 2017), all to be addressed by the group collectively, departing from their respective cultural positions.
From that conceptual context, this seminar was aimed at deposing geoengineering by investigating and re-thinking proportionate, decolonial alternatives to observation and environmental remediation. Remediation was here set an index to multiple, transdisciplinary meanings (Berríos-Negrón 2019); pointing to the questioning assumed colonial knowledges and traumata and their remedies and re-mediations, not just as care, or as physical artistic base-medium, but as an act transforming environmental values and messaging as media. This index of meanings was offered and largely defined by decolonial art methods regarding to Land stemming from Indigenous, Caribbean and Black notions of landscape that culturally and scientifically question racialised enframings of geology and geography (Yusoff 2018) through forms of hydrofeminism (Neimanis 2017), of geopoetics (Magrane et al 2018), of geoaesthetics (LaCour 2022).
That approach to environemtal arts and transdicsiplinary research aspired to offer effective and affective counter-narratives looking to resist dominant racial, colonial, and paternalistic frameworks, especially narratives searching for locally scaled practices to global socio-environmental problems. Ultimately, the seminar move forth between action and inaction, often listening instead of shaping, looking to give body to theories of ‘legal personhood and rights of rivers’ (ibid. Edirisinghe, Suchet-Pearson 2024) were space for counter-narratives to normalised technoscientific remediation could be perhaps supplanted by naive corporal stasis, or traditional Indigenous methods side-stepping and destabilising human perspective as supreme.
The initial module Deposing Geoengineering: Session 1 took place in Zürich at ZHdK during the Fall semester. Starting from a series of lectures at the University, actions followed based on local arts research engagements along the Limmat River within central Zurich. Focus was paid to the gaze of Alpine landscapes as infrastructure, some general knowledge about river colonisation and remediation, and a brief survey of decolonial approaches to geology and geography in the contexts of environmental activism and art in relation to sculpture, installation, performance, visual and sound art.
Session 2 was set as an action-based seminar and field trip that looked to carefully acknowledge the Sápmi and its colonial memory through engagements with the human and non-human communities in and along the Lögde River of Northern Sweden. With the support of the KF Huset art and culture collective, as well as with presentations and walking lectures by local scientists, a sampling of multiperspectival alternatives were offered to the group from ZHdK, where life-affirming practices were set in contrast to a disparate range of scales, from local to social urban/rural disjunctions, to global warming mitigation through reforestation, but more poignantly to restoring and/or remediating water ways, where fostering biodiversity could offer renewed, life-affirming learnings of Indigenous history and traditions, as well as stating renewed relations to the life-sustaining biogeochemistries of river waters and their forests.
To illustrate the controversy, in her recent book Under a White Sky (2021), Elizabeth Kolbert considers the attitudes, particularly the reflex reactions to remedy the planet, by way of vast technological fixes, namely by way of geoengineering, all within the framework of so-called ‘ecotech’. For instance, she states — “[e]ven in an age of electrified rivers and redesigned rodents, geoengineering is out there. It has been described as “dangerous beyond belief,” “a broad highway to hell,” “unimaginably drastic,” and also as “inevitable.”” More specifically, “[t]he premise behind solar geoengineering […] is that if volcanoes can cool the world, people can, too. Throw a gazillion reflective particles into the stratosphere and less sunlight will reach the planet […] The result is white skies, lower temperatures, fantastic sunsets, and, on occasion, famine.” (Kolbert 2021, 228–9).
The parody of Kolbert against the perils of geoengineering is our call to arms for considering and contrasting non-Western perspectives that have been shunned throughout the History and Philosophy of Technology. With that, participants were asked to consider strategies of contemplation, interventionism, resistance, and/or collective action, as both conceptual and in-situ exercises. Research was offered to the student-participants as an effective and affective form to shape counter-narratives that may resist dominant racial, colonial, and paternalistic frameworks, especially narratives searching for local solutions to socio-environmental problems. Focus was paid to theories of ‘legal personhood and rights of rivers’ (ibid. Edirisinghe, Suchet-Pearson 2024) as primary space and propellant for such counter-narratives, where action and inaction may remediate the trauma of depersonalisation and dissociation so to return personhood to natural beings, making and unmaking narratives that suggest a dismantling of traditional methods where human perspective is supreme.
To contribute to the Biosphere in this manner, the research approach will set forth hands-on artistic and experiential methods that are rooted in intersectionality theory (Crenshaw, 1989) and participatory action research [(PAR) Freire 1982; Lewin 1948; Rahman 2008]. The objective of such approach was to encourage and shape storytelling from process-based historical, restoration, sculptural, and spatial production as environmental form and data that acknowledges renewed socio-environmental narratives with the ability to create conditions that enable communities to change their norms from within (Escobar 2005, 1015) while reverting to the primacy of the perspectives of natural environmental beings. This is why the seminar encouraged the overall goal of proposed practice-based research activities that advance knowledge on transdisciplinarity and intersectional research through arts methodologies that go beyond conventional design and technoscientific modes.
Learning Outcomes:
- Considering the role of land and environmental art in relation to anthropogenic impacts.
- Rethinking what geoengineering may mean in relation to various environmental scales.
- What sculpture, performance, installation, and/or visual and non-visual forms of display may manifest in these contexts.
- Consider the role of the artist as researcher, activist, and/or mediator.
- How to revise and engage in acts that may remediate wilderness.
- Revising the history of geology as colonial drive, and our perceptions of geological timescales.
- Revise attitudes and reflexes driving our interventions in regards to environmental form.
- Consider Swiss, Swedish, and European histories, landscapes, and infrastructures in relation to past industrial production and future geoengineering from colonial, sculptural and perceptual standpoints.
These methods are mobilised by sculptural and performative probing of what may loosely be referred to as ‘tree nurseries’. These time-based, alternative, proportionate forms of tree nursing will be contrasted — at least in context — to the scaleless character of geoengineering. The tree nursery will not just be explored in its historical form as greenhouse subset, but expanded as cultural and sculptural specimen, medium, and display — as a phenomenotechnic that challenges ‘observation’ itself as colonial form. As such, tree nurseries will be less of a building and more of an encounter that makes-visible the trauma of hemispheric disparities, of altenative manners in which to enact site-specific biodiversities, while supporting the proportions of direct human-non-human interaction as potential, affirmative form to environmental remediation.
Fotograma de vídeo por Adrian Bracho Cruz González.
Context
To summarise, geoengineering today controversially refers to vast, scaleless solutions for global warming mitigation. To illustrate the controversy, in her recent book Under a White Sky (2021), Elizabeth Kolbert considers the attitudes, particularly the reflex reactions to remedy the planet, by way of vast technological fixes, namely by way of geoengineering. For instance, she states — “[e]ven in an age of electrified rivers and redesigned rodents, geoengineering is out there. It has been described as “dangerous beyond belief,” “a broad highway to hell,” “unimaginably drastic,” and also as “inevitable.”” More specifically, “[t]he premise behind solar geoengineering — or, as it’s sometimes more soothingly called, “solar radiation management” — is that if volcanoes can cool the world, people can, too. Throw a gazillion reflective particles into the stratosphere and less sunlight will reach the planet […] The result is [white skies], lower temperatures, fantastic sunsets, and, on occasion, famine.” (Kolbert 2021, 228–9)
I presented these concerns over geoengineering in contrast to those already voiced in the past by Nobel laureate meteorologist and atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen †, later echoed by art historian T.J. Demos, and most recently by Kolbert, particularly in regards to my decolonial research into the phenomenotechnics of greenhouse as cultural boundary object, and of water as living being, all to be addressed by our group, departing from our respective, current positions. By collecting short histories and stories using environmental form as critical vehicle for our participative research activities on the Limmat and Lögde Rivers, we reaffirmed an approach to process-based artistic and scientific “demonstration” methods that, in local-small scales, address that breaching disproportion between the toxic behaviours of consumption and the realities that small interventions en-masse can generously provide a different kind of re-mediaitons that are far more proportionate and effective than the scalelessness of geoengineering. One method-manner we discussed was that of trans-scaling (Santos 2016), where unlearning, and even undisciplinary learning (Husse, Berríos-Negrón 2016) of binary, urban-rural norms become an intricate part, freshening our perspectives, replenishing, and nourishing Lands and Rivers scarred by the incessant, breaching dissociation between modernity, life, and nature. Here an ethos to enact, support, and celebrate rewilding, leaving resources below ground, contemplation itself as active-inaction, and the development of jurisprudence for the personhood of nature adequately acknowledges the agency of more-than-human entities, not as mode of mere aesthetics, but as a craft for long, steady, careful and delightful survival.
With that ethos, Session 1 at ZHdK was delivered along with host and collaborator Eirini Souridaki, where we initiated the two-week period of lectures and discussions about the principles and problems of geoengineering. We featured lectures by by Berríos-Negrón on colonial memory and decolonial approaches to geology and geography through arts research and interventionism from Caribbean perspectives, by Souridaki on the mythology of Geo in relation to current Land and environmental arts, by Sergio Bravo Josephson on rural community-based research and production, and by fluvial morphologist Lina Polvi on large-scale river restoration. On that first session, in a recognition of Alpine landscapes, we also featured a talk and walk with invited artist Florian Dombois to discuss and rehearse his own arts research explorations of landscapes through sound art with the participants on the Limmat River.
Focus was paid to decolonial approaches to geology and geography in the contexts of environmental activism and art in relation to sculpture, installation, performance, visual and sound art.
For Session 2, the group traveled to the Västerbotten region of Northern Sweden. We were hosted there by KF Huset members Sergio Bravo Josephson and filmmaker Sophia Josephson at the art collective’s communal space in the rural town of Klöse by the Lögde River. The session was coordinated to unfold as a series of talks taking place at the KFHuset space where the participants would be guided on walks and actions along riparian sections of the river, either directly affected by, or remediated from the timber (floating) industry. We focused on not just learning about the region’s Indigenous precedence as the Sápmi, the river’s technological history, but also about its surrounding rural cultures, and the regional tensions in Sweden between south and northern regions, especially considering Indigenous rights and unresolved colonial legacies. With that backdrop, we received a lecture and workshop by filmmaker Sophia Josephson at KF Huset, a small symposium by architect and river expert Cornelia Redecker at Umeå University, and two excellent guided walks by environmental and fluvial researcher Judith Sarneel of Umeå Univeristy, ending with a timber workshop by Jorma Salmgren at his studio in Olofors Bruk.
ZHdK Transdisciplinarity Programme Participants were Adrian Bracho Cruz González, Bui Duy, Christian Eckstein, Jehisson Santacruz Giraldo, Julian Fehr, Lily Pellaud, Melia Roger, Natalia Sierra Poveda, Roxani Marty, Tim Wettstein. And the seminar was proposed and led by Luis Berríos-Negrón, then artist and independent research, and now associate professor at Umeå University’s School of Architecture, in collaboration with ZHdK PhD candidate Eirini Souridaki, and with Sergio Bravo Josephson, then Senior Lecturer at Konstfack University of the Arts in Stockholm, and now PhD candidate at UID of Umeå University.
// This report is still under development. More Soon. //
