Subatlantic | 2015

The science fictional video essay unfolds across the Subatlantic, the latest climatic phase of the Holocene that began about 2,500 years ago and is still ongoing. With its peaks and drops, this climatic period has registered major civilizational changes and movements, juxtaposing the science of geology and climatology with human history. The voice-over alludes to a she-scientist who is making instrumental observations about a changing environment around the last glacial melts. From an increasingly submerged place of oceanic observation, her objects of examination are as much the physical and atmospheric condition as the thoughts that are formed, reconfigured or released under the changing ecologies of the world system.

Subatlantic, of course, also means the submerged space of the Atlantic Ocean. Set in the Shetland Islands, Greenland’s Disco Bay and on a tiny Caribbean Island, the video implicates far apart locations that are connected through invisible Ocean streams which determine the temperatures in the North Atlantic, sea and land. The video addresses two submerged dynamics that ensue from the melting of the Arctic ice: The slowing down of the Ocean streams and the release of massive new genetic materials that have been locked in the ice sheets for longer than human time. In both instances, the dynamics driving these physical processes are non-localized and invisible to our eye.

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