The underground occupies the paradox of being both an economically and climate-relevant zone. Mineral extraction and CO2 sequestration are vital for achieving a NetZero balance and the Energy Transition. However, these methods also present a contradiction, as they carry environmental risks.
The Flechtwerk Association cordially invites you to explore artistic perspectives on our ambivalent actions to save the future and to reflect on our interconnectedness with the Earth’s deep subsurface and its impact on our bodies, minds, and existence. Join our exhibition, workshop, and Layer Talks, featuring film screenings on technological interventions in linear solution paradigms that perpetuate the seemingly endless cycle of consumption and production.
The deep subsurface serves as a site of aesthetic imagination and a knowledge initiator of our contemporary petromodernity. The seemingly unbreakable cycle of consumption and production projects a yearning for geopolitical strategising at both local and global levels. Given today’s significant greenhouse gas emissions, even climate research increasingly supports utilising the depths as a carbon dioxide storage solution to combat global warming.The moral risk is little debated, and discourse in public hardly takes place. Does technological accessibility to the underground provide a blank check for increased production, and who will oversee any eventual misconduct? What becomes of the deep Earth when we use it as a tank for our waste, and how do we approach this concurrent dilemma? One potential approach to an integrated perspective is to define and experience our relationships with the underground as a realm of profound uncertainties and question our tendency to conceptualise in vertically linear paths of rational directionality.
The art/sci workshop verti(E)cology takes an initial step in this direction and, with invited scientists and artists, explores the vertical relationships between the underground and aboveground and their effects on our living environment and lived experiences. We invite you to participate in the development of an initial #blueprint that evaluates the deep layers of the Earth, interrogates the extent to which our thought processes are influenced by vertical power hierarchies and coloniality, and investigates the requirements for future frameworks of a “verti(E)cology.”
Flechtwerk’s LAYER TALKS is a new programme that invites artists, scientists, humanists, and technologists to engage in informal presentations, performances, and discussions with the broader public on topics related to the Earth’s layers and their interconnectedness with our lives. The mission is to promote dialogue regarding the
understanding and awareness of the deep subsurface through inter- and transdisciplinary formats.
REGISTRATION for the WORKSHOP and attendance at the EXHIBITION outside of the Opening and the Layer Talks: connect@flechtwerk.or.at
