[spectre] The Sea is Glowing opens in Rijeka (HR) on 20 August 2020

[Inke Arns]

Dear friends,

I am currently traveling on the amazing night train from Munich to Rijeka. 

In Rijeka my colleagues of Drugo more are currently setting up the exhibition „The Sea is Glowing“ which I curated for the European Capital of Culture Rijeka 2020. Rijeka is a port city located at the Northern Adriatic coast of Croatia. The exhibition venue is a former wood storage built in 1961 – Exportdrvo – located right in the industrial port of Rijeka next to the opera house (and to Tito’s former yacht). The three main topics of the European Capital of Culture Rijeka 2020 - Port of Diversity - are the future of work, migration, and the sea.

This exhibition was due to take place from 23 April until July 2020. Due to the global Corona pandemic the opening had to be postponed until 20 August 2020.

The exhibition looks at new invisible economies connected to the sea – in the ocean, like deep sea mining, at the sea shore, like offshore tax havens, and on the sea, like ultra-libertarian seasteading start-ups. All of these activities are part of new economies that involve new kinds of labour (like care work), logistics, or new kinds of capital circulation (like freeports). The artists in the exhibition The Sea is Glowing look at weird Amazon shops, externalized care work, deep sea mining, rising sea levels, hidden offshore paradises, empires of amateur pornography and other lucrative shores. In short: A sea of labour.

Please find the LIST OF ARTISTS and the INTRODUCTION below.

Looking forward to see some of you in Rijeka on 20-22 August!

All the best,
Inke


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THE SEA IS GLOWING

→ Exportdrvo, Rijeka/HR
→ in the framework of the European Capital of Culture Rijeka 2020
→ 20 August – 1 November 2020

→ Participating artists: Aram Bartholl, Ursula Biemann, DISNOVATION.ORG, Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman / Daniel Keller, Steffen Köhn, Lawrence Lek, Rebecca Moss, Jenny Odell, Elisa Giardina Papa, Lisa Rave, Marie Reinert, Tabita Rezaire, RYBN, Sebastian Schmieg, Hito Steyerl

Curated by Inke Arns

More information:
→ http://drugo-more.hr/en/the-sea-is-glowing/


ARTISTS & WORKS 

Aram Bartholl
Unlock Life
Installation, rental e-scooters, rental bikes, variable, 2020

Ursula Biemann
Deep Weather
Single channel video projection, 2013, 9:00 min.

DISNOVATION.ORG
Shanzai Archaeology
Installation, collection, research, 2 videos, 2015-2018

Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman / Daniel Keller
The Seasteaders
Single-channel video, 2018, 28:36 min.

Steffen Köhn
Always Here
Video, 2015, 11:24 min.

Lawrence Lek
Sinofuturism (1839 - 2046 AD)
HD video essay, 3-channel video installation, 2016/2020, 60:00 min.

Rebecca Moss
International Waters
Video, 2017, 20:00 min.

Jenny Odell
A Business With No End
Interactive web project, 2018

Elisa Giardina Papa
Technologies of Care
Video installation, 2016, 24:47 min.

Lisa Rave
Europium
HD video, 2014, 20:00 min.

Marie Reinert
I see
7 interviews, 7 sound files, 7 vinyl records, 7 record players, 2020

Tabita Rezaire
Deep Down Tidal
HD video, 2017, 18:44 min.

RYBN
The Great Offshore
Installation, chart, wallpaper, several showcases, tables, chairs, computer workstations, video player, MP3 player, headphones, 2019/2020

RYBN
Offshore Tour Operator
GPS prototype, 2019/2020

Sebastian Schmieg
I Will Say Whatever You Want In Front Of A Pizza
Video loop, lecture performance, Prezi, 2017, 12:29 min.

Hito Steyerl
Liquidity Inc.
HD video file, single channel in architectural environment, 2014, 30:15 min.


INTRODUCTION
The Sea is Glowing

Inke Arns

In his popular Sci-Fi novel The Swarm (2004) German author Frank Schätzing describes freak events related to the world's oceans: worms, together with bacteria, destabilize the methane clathrate in the continental shelf. When the continental slope collapses, the subterranean landslide causes a tsunami that hits most of the North Sea's coasts, killing millions and severely damaging the infrastructure in the coastal regions. In other incidents whales and sea-borne mussels incapacitate a commercial freighter; swimmers are driven from the coast by sharks and venomous jellyfish. Humpback whales and orcas collaboratively attack whale watcher's boats. France sees an outbreak of an epidemic caused by lobsters contaminated with a highly lethal type of Pfiesteria; and the North American east coast is overrun by Pfiesteria-infested crabs that attack New York City, Washington D.C. and later Boston, causing millions of deaths and rendering the affected cities uninhabitable. It soon turns out that all these events are related and that they are part of a worldwide phenomenon: intentional attacks by an unknown sentient species (the “yrr“) from the depths of the oceans with the goal of eliminating the human race, which is devastating the Earth's oceans. The “yrr” are single-cell organisms that operate in groups (swarms), controlled by a single hive-mind – a collective intelligence – that may have existed for hundreds of millions of years.

How is this dark ecological vision of the future connected to Dopolavoro? The Sci-Fi novel The Swarm indirectly informed the concept of the exhibition The Sea is Glowing which is now on display at Exportdrvo, a former wood storage facility built in 1961 and located right in the industrial port of Rijeka. Invited to curate an exhibition about the future of work in the context of Dopolavoro, and knowing the city of Rijeka, albeit superficially, from a previous visit and exhibition production[1] in 2017, I quickly understood that this exhibition could not simply be about work. As it is taking place in the context of the European Capital of Culture Rijeka 2020, it would have to deal with the sea, more precisely: with new economies and new forms of work related to the sea. Europe is a maritime continent shaped by the sea. In geographical terms, it has more contact with the sea, relative to its total land area, than any of the other continents.

The exhibition The Sea is Glowing looks at new invisible economies connected to the sea – in the ocean, like deep sea mining, at the seashore, like offshore tax havens, and on the sea, like ultra-libertarian sea-steading start-ups. All of these activities are part of new economies that involve new kinds of labour, like outsourced micro-work, global logistics, or new kinds of capital circulation, happening in places like freeports. Harbour cities are of particular interest for these kinds of economies because of their (at times) special taxation model. In addition, the deep sea is a ‘new frontier’ in the quest for resources. The 15 artists in the exhibition The Sea Is Glowing look at weird Amazon shops, externalized data-cleaning work, deep sea mining and black smokers, rising sea levels, hidden offshore havens, empires of amateur pornography and other lucrative shores. In short: a sea of labour.

Several works in the exhibition explicitly focus on these new forms of labour. How is work changing under conditions of accelerated digitisation and globalization? What kind of working conditions are arising from distributed systems and social media platforms – and how are these working conditions affecting the individual? For her installation Technologies of Care (2016) Elisa Giardina Papa interviewed freelancers who offer digital micro-services, fetish work or emotional support online. The interviews read like chamber plays on unfettered digital neoliberalism. Similarly, Steffen Köhn’s protagonists are, as the title of his video suggests, Always Here (2015). On various websites, they perform sexual acts for money. While waiting for clients, they make small talk, they surf the net or discuss dinner plans. For his installation Unlock Life (2020) Aram Bartholl retrieved a number of rental e-scooters and bikes from different canals of Berlin. Provided by start-up companies these vehicles have swamped all major European cities in recent years. Many of them get thrown into the canals of the city. Once pulled out of the water, the scooters are covered with mud and algae, and are inhabited by small crabs and worms. Sebastian Schmieg’s video I Will Say Whatever You Want in Front of a Pizza (2017) explores digital labor and looks at digital workers as software extensions. The protagonist is a cloud worker who, while working as a pizza delivery bot, starts wondering about the possibility of solidarity among the contemporary distributed global workforce.

Beyond labour, and working conditions per se, liquidity, the metaphor of fluidity and uncanny e-commerce are further topics in the exhibition. In her interactive web project A Business With No End (2018) Jenny Odell takes us on a surreal trip deep into the internet rabbit hole of uncanny e-commerce. We end up with a global religious community that has been the subject of numerous articles that allege labour violations, fraud and abuse. In Liquidity Inc. (2014) Hito Steyerl talks about Jacob Wood, a financial analyst who lost his job in the economic crash of 2008 and became a career mixed-martial-arts fighter. With its computer-generated waves and news footage of hurricanes and tsunamis, the installation which is set up like a raft uses water and extreme weather as metaphors for the fluidity of financial assets and digital information, and for a collective sense of instability.

Two works in the exhibition explicitly focus on China as the new global industrial and technological superpower. DISNOVATION.ORG’s Shanzai Archaeology (2015-18) looks at counterfeit consumer goods, particularly in the field of electronics and presents an extraordinary collection of mobile phones from this technological interbreeding Made in China merging piracy, reverse engineering, unique creativity and self-taught skills. Lawrence Lek’s Sinofuturism (2016-20) talks about an invisible movement embedded into a trillion industrial products, a billion individualsand a million veiled narratives, which is often mistaken for contemporary China. By embracing seven key stereotypes of Chinese society (for example, computing, copying, gaming, labour and gambling) Lek shows how China's technological development can be seen as a form of Artificial Intelligence.

Other works in the exhibition can be grouped together based on their location in relation to the sea: as to whether they are located at the seashore, at sea, in international waters or in the deep sea. Ursula Biemann’s video Deep Weather (2013) looks at global interactions between the vast open-pit mines and steam processing of the oil-infused sand and clay of northern Alberta, Canada and Bangladesh where rising sea levels – a result of melting Himalayan ice – are claiming inhabitable land, impacting large populations with nowhere else to go. RYBN’s The Great Offshore (2019/2020) invites us on a journey to the most uncanny incarnations of the offshore industry: art freeports, Luxemburg‘s futuristic space mining projects, Malta's golden passport programs, experimental sea-steading projects – all based on the legal framework that rules the oceans (freeports, deep-sea mining, flags of convenience, international waters). RYBN’s Offshore Tour Operator (2019/2020) is a situationist GPS prototype that allows the user to walk through the ICIJ Offshore Leaks database[2] addresses. For The Sea Is Glowing, RYBN will take visitors on a special city tour: Equipped with audio guides, they will pay a visit to the local addresses of Rijeka-based owners of offshore companies.

Other works in the exhibition explore topics like logistics, colonialism and extraction, and how these are all closely interconnected. Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman / Daniel Keller’s video The Seasteaders (2018) looks at the activities of the ultra-libertarian Seasteading Institute. Founded by the Silicon Valley billionaire investor Peter Thiel, its goal was to build a permanent and politically autonomous settlement off the coast of the South Pacific islands. Rising sea levels threaten French Polynesia's existence, which made a proposal to build new land appealing to the government. However, locals from Tahiti grew increasingly concerned about the prospect of “tech colonialism.” Rebecca Moss‘ video International Waters (2017) documents the case of a 65,000-tonne ship sitting off the coast of Japan idling in international waters after Hanjin Shipping Co., the world’s seventh-largest container shipper, filed for bankruptcy in August 2016. The collapse of the Seoul-based company left an estimated 2,500 sailors, most of them from South Korea, the Philippines and Indonesia, stranded at sea alongside $14bn worth of goods. In Deep Down Tidal (2017) Tabita Rezaire draws a striking parallel between the routing of submarine fibre-optic cables and the historical colonial maritime trade routes used by the slave ships. The artist understands the ocean as a repository of Black knowledge and Black technologies while at the same time containing the global infrastructure of today’s telecommunications which is the material basis for a new – this time electronic – colonialism. In her video Europium (2014) Lisa Rave looks at a rare earth that – because of its fluorescent property – is a key element in colour screens, and is used for smartphone displays, tablets, laptops and other flat screens. Europium draws connections between Papua New Guinea's colonial past and the planned excavation of raw materials from the Bismarck Sea.

Finally, Marie Reinert has been embarking on a very specific research for this exhibition. Before the Corona lockdown, in February / March 2020, she conducted interviews with several residents of Rijeka about their vision of the future: She talked to a philosopher, a business woman, an anarchist, the mayor of Rijeka, a feminist, a child, and a foreigner, all based in Rijeka. In the sound installation I see (2020) we can listen, via audio recordings pressed on vinyl records, to seven individual imaginaries and join each individual’s speculative dérive through the city.

The Sea Is Glowing is an ambivalent title that was carefully chosen for this exhibition. Synonyms for glowing could be burning, blazing, gleaming, glimmering, glittering, glistening, shining, simmering or smoldering. If a school of fish comes near the surface of the sea, for example when it is attacked by predators, the sea, due to the agitated bodily movement of the fish, might look like it was boiling. Glowing could indicate light, like when metal is being melted, or it could indicate heat and point to the problem of rising temperatures and global warming. It could also describe the sudden transition from one physical state to the other, i.e. from solid to liquid or liquid to gas.

The exhibition The Sea Is Glowing depicts a situation that leads to, and is set just prior to, an ecological tipping point – even if only one project, Ursula Biemann’s Deep Weather, explicitly deals with the ecological consequences of an economic system based on extraction. The exhibition also looks at new forms of exploitation of human labour. While The Swarm – and the revenge of the “yrr” – illustrates a future yet to come, it also represents a backdrop against which the exhibition displays and dissects the present – our present; a present full of work.


[1] The World Without Us, curated by Inke Arns, produced by and presented at HMKV, Dortmund (DE), Aksioma / Vžigalica Gallery, Ljubljana (SI), and Drugo more / Mali salon, Rijeka (HR), 2016-2017

[2] ICIJ stands for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The ICIJ Offshore Leaks database lists the legal owners of more than 785,000 offshore companies, foundations and trusts from the Panama Papers, the Offshore Leaks, the Bahamas Leaks and the Paradise Papers investigations. See https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/