MONSTERS'N'GHOSTS
Creating Counter-Environments by Mining Empathy, Intra-Agency,
and Multi-Species Entanglement
The works created under the umbrella of MONSTERS'N'GHOSTS are responses to and challenges of my feelings of intimidation and helplessness in the face of accelerating climate change and environmental degradation. Spurred by the interdisciplinary edited collection Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene and the multimodal conference Aesthetics of Contamination, and amazed by the posthumanist approach to "spacetimematter" developed in Meeting the Universe Halfway, I step outside my comfort zone to create visual counter-environments that I hope will inspire the audience.
For the editors of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, "monsters" point to multi-species assemblages that highlight our embeddedness in the webs of life. "Ghosts" refer to what haunts us in landscapes shaped by past destruction and today's debris. Together, these "creatures of ambivalent entanglement" expose and tackle the phantasmal twin myths of human progress and individuality. In addition, for me, actively acknowledging creatures that commonly qualify as monstrous or ghostly implies transcending entrenched conceptions and tapping into unbiasedness, flexibility, and unconditional empathy instead. Moreover, I think of phenomena that evade the human eye or common sense (or both) − such as quantum effects or molecular biotic processes and principles − as "ghostly" without meaning to suggest that there is anything unreal or otherworldly about them.
To become intimate with monsters and ghosts, I am working towards a deeper understanding of and feeling for the diverse ways of physical and ecological embeddedness, and interspecies connectedness by drawing on in sights and approaches from environmental humanities and sciences. In addition, I am sharpening my actual and metaphorical senses for reading the signs and narratives of both human-made environmental devastation and the miracles of life.
The urgency and frustration I feel, paired with the desire to honor and celebrate the natural world of which we are a part, is changing the pattern of my artistic practice: distanced control and rationality, and personal invisibility give way to informed spontaneity and playfulness, and the involvement of my physical self. Giving up full control and exposing myself convey our shared vulnerability and limits of power. At the same time, they point to the potentialities inherent to shedding detachment and passivity by taking personal risks to advocate for resilience, commitment, and care.
MONSTERS'N'GHOSTS also involves revisiting older projects and works, as well as mining unfinished or unpublished material to combine and interweave it with new footage. Notably, I draw from the research and production for Nature happens. (2013−2015), Fedje (2012), transient (2009), and estuaire central (2008).
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