{"id":14860,"date":"2020-12-17T21:38:24","date_gmt":"2020-12-17T21:38:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=14860"},"modified":"2021-07-22T20:53:27","modified_gmt":"2021-07-22T20:53:27","slug":"fault-lines-and-fractures-a-conversation-about-imaginary-explosions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=14860","title":{"rendered":"Fault Lines and Fractures: A Conversation about Imaginary Explosions<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Is there life after annihilation? Artist Caitlin Berrigan engages this question as a matter of necessity for geosocial existence and survival. The question also animates our mutual interests in deep time, the embodiments of fieldwork, and feminist approaches to technoscience. While the elemental zones through which we practice differ\u2014I am a geographer who traces atmospheres and Caitlin follows the subterranean forces of rock and seismicity\u2014our commitments to distributed networks of feeling and hybrid, technological forms of perception are resonant. Our work finds a common interface in the geohumanities, a discipline emerging from collaborations among geographers and artists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We first met at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany, where Caitlin held a fellowship and was working on her first book. Later, when we were thousands of kilometers apart, we spoke about art and geography in relation to Caitlin\u2019s project Imaginary Explosions\u2014<\/em>a collection of episodic videos, sculptures, and texts that explores geologic histories, sexual violence, transfeminist coalitions, and expanded forms of sensing and signaling.<\/em> In 2018\u201319, Caitlin was the recipient of a commission from the Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities, University of London<\/a>, which supported a collaboration with volcanologist Karen Holmberg as well as a new video episode in the Imaginary Explosions<\/em> series. In our discussion, we discover fault lines and fractures, mineral accretions and sedimentations of subjectivity, epistemology and geology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014Sasha Engelmann<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Caitlin Berrigan, Imaginary Explosions<\/i>, 2018, artist\u2019s book, 6 5\/8 x 9 5\/8 in. (17 x 24.5 cm), 208 pages, Berlin: Broken Dimanche Press<\/a> (artwork \u00a9 Caitlin Berrigan; design, Form und Konzept, Berlin; image data derived from the 2016 National Land Survey of Iceland; data processing, modeling, and rendering assistance, Lily Fang, John Fowler; photographs and animation provided by the artist). All following images \u00a9 Caitlin Berrigan.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Caitlin Berrigan<\/strong>: Thank you for reading Imaginary Explosions<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sasha Engelmann:<\/strong> It\u2019s a feat. It was overwhelming. The matrices you weave in words, images, and moving images perform a kind of \u201cgeological sociality,\u201d in the sense that one is impressed with the intimacies of flesh and rock, vulvas and volcanoes, blood and mineral. This is a sociality in the original sense of the Latin word socius<\/em>, \u201cto be allied, to be entangled with.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In your studio, I saw your 3D visualizations and thought this book was going to be an experimental and diagrammatic work. I didn\u2019t know you were also a poet and writer. These alliances of language and visual material were beautiful to encounter in these pages, especially because of the ways in which multiple temporalities of the geologic, the volcanic, and the human are expressed. Can you talk a bit about how you composed these materials in the book?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Berrigan<\/strong>: I wrote it over a few years. Short phrases started emerging, and I began writing them into gestural drawings. I was trying to find a language for latent catastrophes and violence, both social and environmental, and how we interpret and (mis)recognize their signs. A friend suggested, \u201cMaybe this needs to be a book.\u201d I began extending the written form into longer narrative poems. That felt on point. Then followed the technically complex and laborious process of producing all the topographical images, which are not illustrations but rather landscapes for the words. They are rendered using distant radar computations of the surface area of an active volcano in Iceland. I made a 3D model and moved through it to capture still frames with a virtual camera, placing sequential vistas from this path through the book, such that turning the pages is like walking through the volcanic landscape. It brings pauses between texts and dilations across light and dark gradients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engelmann<\/strong>: Yes. It doesn\u2019t rest entirely on the description of matter\u2019s fleshiness and the depiction of hot, earthy intimacies; it uses the trope of the volcanic explosion or the rocky avalanche as a grammatical gesture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your description of making the images for the book through a \u201cvirtual camera\u201d immediately makes me think of the series of videos that are equally part of the Imaginary Explosions<\/em> cosmology. You have produced two video episodes so far, which have invoked volcanic landscapes, ancient caves, and a cast of interconnected, multispecies characters with varying forms of artistic, technical, and scientific expertise\u2014all to propose different modes of becoming geologic. And I feel that the book, as well as these video episodes,1<\/a><\/sup> are probing and experimenting with the question of how to transpose myths of mineral, rock, and hot matter into timescales (or into forms of \u201cpresent remoteness\u201d) that are accessible by humans. In other words: How does one tell an ancient, \u201cinhuman\u201d story in the familiar terms of the present and the everyday?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Berrigan<\/strong>: One way that I have worked to do this is to explore the deep sense of time and temporality that links narrative episodes of geological ruptures with those of human trauma, and specifically with intergenerational narratives of sexual violence. Much like geological events, which are ongoing and latent and hardly given notice until they suddenly surge into human space and time (such as a volcanic eruption), intimate forms of sexual and domestic violence are similarly constant undercurrents in our lives. They are treated as isolated and personal events, despite the fact that we know that sexual violence is a pervasive, systemic social issue. Trauma from sexual violence reverberates across many different bodies through time and permeates our ways of interrelating. When I try to imagine the scales of sexual violence, I can only imagine the space required to hold the grief as taking on the magnitude of the whole planet. Time is a spatial experience, one that\u2014like trauma\u2014is in excess of the human body. This was the motivation to combine the spatial form of the codex with nonlinear and nonchronological texts to offer a somatic, time-based reading of violence and the fragmentation of subjectivity it provokes. The texts avoid narrating the events in favor of anticipation and aftermath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deep time is both the subject\u2014as the geological narratives throughout the book\u2014and also the concept at the root of \u201cbecoming mineral.\u201d Both extend the idea that in our individual human shapes we exist alongside other forms and materialities of time that extend before, after, and through us. The idea of deep time embodiment and interdependence is in contrast to the logics of patriarchal violence, which calls itself into being as the exceptional power to exist outside of and master over others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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