"Arctic Archipelago" 2021 and "Not Planet Earth" 2021

Susan Schuppli

Born 1959, Ottawa, Canada. Lives and works in London, England. Pronouns: she/her.

 

"Arctic Archipelago" 2021

single-channel HD video, sound, 16:9 26:20 minutes

 

"Not Planet Earth" 2021

single-channel HD video, sound, 16:9, 14:24 minutes

 

Courtesy of the artist.

 

This two-part video installation by artist-researcher Susan Schuppli problematises how we might visually depict nature in a dramatically changed world. Arctic Archipelago journeys through Svalbard in Norway, where images of calving icebergs and melting glaciers recall the archetypal cinematography of climate change. A sublime world of snow and ice belies the complex geopolitical realities of coal extraction and competing sovereignties. Beyond the visual field of the camera lens, military communications colonise the electromagnetic atmosphere, while nuclear submarines lurk beneath the Arctic ice.

 

Not Planet Earth acts as a self-reflexive accompanying footnote. Here, Schuppli scrutinises the act of filmmaking as a technology of capture and control, examining her own complicity within this settler-colonial continuum. Foregrounding the camera, she draws our attention to its role in the production of meaning and perception. Her approach underscores how the history of image production is entangled with the environmental conditions it seeks to document: from the extraction of rare earth minerals embedded into photographic equipment to the use of petroleum and chemicals in film production.

 

Schuppli explores various strategies to ‘denaturalise’ the nature documentary genre, signalling the post-natural state of transformation that defines our present. Environmental systems such as sea spray, saline winds, and icy temperatures become artistic mediums in Schuppli’s video. As collaborators, they cause lens distortion and freeze frames, resisting depiction and suggesting the impossibility of capturing the globally dispersed climate crisis in a single image.

 

Schuppli is known for ‘investigative aesthetics’, making links between materialities and judicial and political systems, often in collaboration with Forensic Architecture, a human-rights agency based at Goldsmith’s University in London. Invoking the legal concept of ‘material witness’ as an ecological strategy, Schuppli extends this to include the more-than-human world, asking how can matter bear witness to our anthropogenic fingerprint? Evidence of this might include melting polar ice caps, bleached coral reefs, or contaminated bodies. How can matter register external events and expose the practices that enable it to bear witness? How can nature represent itself?