Post Doc:

2023 - 2024: The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System, under Prof Katherine Richardson at ‘Queen Margrethe’s and Vigdís Finnbogadóttir´s Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ocean, Climate, and Society’ (ROCS), Center for Marcoecology, Evolution and Climate (CMEC), The Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Brief project description

The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System is an art practice-based research project, examining ‘mud-scapes’ and the social, political, and bio-chemical, effects of their motion.

For millennia, ‘static muds’ facilitated cultural exchanges across legal boundaries. Those once secure muds are now in motion. Glaciers and inland ice melt, as mudflats and swamps reclaim space from human occupation. Permafrost melts and

sinks, as elsewhere land slips, lakes recede and their beds collapse. Swelling muds slide toward the oceans, facilitating the increasingly garbled circulations of the Earth System.

The Ocean-Lands reflects on, and augments, work developing across other disciplines that are beginning to mark out a Venn diagram of intersecting concerns. At present, no single discipline spans the central intersection. The Ocean-Lands looks toward that future discipline, with the objective of contributing a new ethical-aesthetic public language capable of communicating the shifts occurring within the Earth System.

The project explores two, inter-related, questions: ‘The Social-Organisational Effects of the Ocean-Land Muds in Motion’ and ‘The Bio-Communicative Effects of the Ocean-Land Muds in Transition’. Each devolves into a series of interrelated

sub-questions, or tributaries, reflecting the transitional, circulatory, and uncertain, nature of the developing mud crisis.

These questions, will be explored, and expanded on, in a continuous, iterative, process between academic and creative works, drawing on fieldwork in Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard, Gotland and Denmark. Artistic outputs will take the form of four large-scale visual-cognitive maps, seven exhibitions, a book, and narrative-orientated documentary film, with immediate target groups in art and academia and, more widely at the different medias of the public sphere.

Dust & Flow: Muds, Movement, Time and Scale [Film no.1, 28,53min.] (2024)

Dust & Flow draws together recent scientific research on mud and sediment flows, eDNA, and the concept of ‘deep-time’, with personal responses to the planet’s new moving landscapes, examining the way humans are attempting to make sense of impossibly rapid changes occurring in the Earth System.

The ground beneath our feet is now moving – at human speeds. The body of the Earth bleeds mud. The synthesis of earth and water does not speak, but stares blankly back at us. Strangely forceful winter rains no longer connect to ground water; and new mud-lakes claim once fertile fields. Elsewhere, the rains propel muds down swollen river courses to the sea; unprecedented sedimentary flows congregate off-shore, causing biochemical changes to the oceans we do not yet understand. Closer the centre of the heat, where fish swam half a century ago, ‘Lake Chad’ is now a dried-out mud-scab. Everywhere, the natural foundations that supported the mechanics of Modernity are warping and dissipating – speeding change; re-programming us. And we struggle, as if to catch a bullet in flight; desperately attempting to update our understanding of this new biochemical topography.

The film examines the deep history of the ocean-land relation and the very recent development of new ‘mud-scapes’. The film weaves developments on the islands of Gotland, Iceland, and Svalbard, with up-to-the-moment scientific research and our culturally-limited understandings of history and time. Hung-up on human conceptions of History and politics, we struggle to understand the vastly accelerated scale of movement and time demonstrated by the muds.

Luther’s visual engagements with these fast-mutating landscapes stretches the objective ‘documentary form’ to allow an account the author’s own subjective interior dialogue. The innovative script is voiced by the actor David Bateson, performing the roles of the narrator, Luther, Luther’s inner dialogue, and two additional characters.

Dust & Flow has been created in response to a Nordic Alliance of Artistic Residencies for Climate Action (NAARCA) funded commission, and produced with additional funds from Art Hub Copenhagen and the Swedish Arts Council.

The film forms part of Luther’s Novo Nordisk-funded post-doctoral project The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System, based at Queen Margrethe’s and Vigdis Finnbogadottir’s Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ocean, Climate, and Society (ROCS) at Copenhagen University. The Ocean-Lands is attempting to outline the social, political, and bio-chemical, implications of rapid movements in the planet’s new 'mud-scapes'.

Intro, landslide last ice age and mud from the Greenland ice sheet

Gotland

Iceland

Svalbard

- Podcast in co-work with ArtHub at ANA (2023): Dead and Life in Mud - A Split Second of 2 million years (47min.) Rikke
Luther & Karina Krarup Sand, Geo-genetics, Globe Institute, KU

The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System [Film no.2 in process, 2024/2025]

Preface
Muds are in motion. Around the planet a new world is born, landscape is melting to ‘mud-scapes.

Human-time measures development through fragments of pottery – muds given solid form and purpose by human hands. Every mud is a mixture of soils and the never-ending circulation of water within the ‘Earth System’.

Every mud mixes the political territories humans claim to hold and control with Earth’s systems humans scarcely understand, let alone control. In mud, the tiny scale of human histories mixes with the vast scale of the planet’sand that of the cosmos.

Within the developing Ocean-Lands - a littoral formed by the jurisdiction of nations and the infinite spaces of the ocean-commons and atmosphere –muds take on a new significance. Cultures that once measured themselves by longevity of their stories and the stability of the institutions they built, are humiliated; forced to admit they are merely the content of more powerful systems.

For millennia, ‘static muds’ facilitated culture, trade, and the exchange of ideas across legal boundaries. Those secure muds are now in motion.

Glaciers and inland ice melt as mud-flats and swamps reclaim space from human occupation. Permafrost melts and sinks, as elsewhere landslips. Lakes recede, their beds dry and collapse. Seas of stones left by retreating inland ice leave flowers of a pre-human past, rich in quicksilver and uranium. Swelling muds slide toward the oceans, to join the garbled circulations of the Earth System.

Muds are a medium though which bacteria organise themselves. As Earth Systems bend and warp, their organisation changes.

Though no politician could admit it, such micro-organisms created the territories they command. Primitive planktons two million years ago facilitated the creation of mountains by lubricating the movement of one slab of rock upon another under the pressure of moving tectonic plates.

Human perspective compresses and distorts the ‘deep-time’ cycles of plankton and mountain. Yet, human-time now forces planetary systems to spin to our arrhythmic patterns.

As the UN Environmental Program notes, humanity is edging toward a ‘transformative collapse’.

3. Mud in the Earth System / 3.1 Moving with the Muds in Greenland / 3.2 Time-Scale: The Biosphere and Geosphere – Establishing the Earth System State / 3.3 Time-Scale: The Environmental DNA – ‘A Second is Like Two Million Years’ / 3.4 The New Life: Atmosphere and Corpses / 3.5 The Slow and Fast Carbon Cycle / 3.6 Dust and Flow

3.7 Mud and Ocean - about the ‘Gletcsher Rock Flour in the Sea’ project (GRFOS-1, summer ekspedition, Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, 2023)

2022 - 2024: Research project More Mud for Art Hub under Nordic Alliance of Artists’ Residencies on Climate Action (NAARCA) is a part of the Post Doc. It includs working with institutions in Iceland (Skaftfell), Sweden (Baltic Art Center & GRASS Fellow, GRASS Fellow Programme Uppsala University, Campus Gotland), Denmark (Art Hub), Svalbard (Artica), Greenland (Narsaq International Research Station), Scotland and Finland on research, production, exhibitions and seminars.

Podcast:

Testing Grounds, episode 4, Baltic Art Center Artists' Role in an Age of Climate Crisis, spring 2023 [Podcast] with director of Baltic Art Center H. Selder, N. & G. Urbonas, Luther (Katie Revell)

2020/2021/22: Artistic research, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art
The New Mud is a research project in the cluster Digital Matters, Digital Materialities at the Institute for Art, Writing and Research, Royal Danish Art Academy for Fine Arts. Part of the research was done at the Narsaq International Research Station, Narsaq, Greenland, outputs was exhibited at Astrid Noacks Atelier, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Left: From the serie More Mud, 2021 Above: Missing Atmospheric Ice Crystal, 2021

2019: Lunar Concrete - Regolith Extraction in Outer Space and 3D printing on the Moon and in Mud on Earth is a one-year artistic development project at the Royale Danish Art Academy for Fine Arts. It is developed by Karen Harsbo (Ceramic Lab) and Rikke Luther (Institute for Art, Writing and Research) and is aiming at practically exploring and unfolding the notion of the material lunar regolith, through 3D print and earth minerals, in form of interdisciplinary artistic research.

3D printed Lunar-concrete are linked to Si-Fi, military, political, technological developments, the ‘New Industrial Space Industry’ and the historical background for concrete in space started with 40g of the lunar regolith in 1986.

Abstract

We are in oxygen low water. Its still battered by waves from the 2008-financial crisis. In our time, democracy is aggressively interrogated from many different perspectives, which in turn determine the contexts of artistic action and research. From one side, the concept of ‘Carbon Democracy’ maps democracy’s entwined relationship to the economies of material extraction, power, and the planetary fact of ‘climate collapse’ [Mitchell, Carbon Democracy]. From another, the concept of ‘Post-Democracy’ [Crouch] maps out the highs and lows of democratic agency. Here, the peaks of democratic engagement in the 20^thcentury are being levelled down by an era of rising economic and political inequality – a process that occurs both within nation states and between the nation states of the ‘developed’, and ‘developing’, worlds. In parallel, the political power of democracy is increasingly decentralised and weakened, only for that power to be re-centralised in the private boardrooms of post-national corporations. And, while this process has occurred, our climate has been warming.

Space is full of stories. And there are many ‘spaces’. Those images of coherence by which we navigate our lives, are rooted in the perspectives of particular places, social relations, history and time [Massey, For Space].The spaces of landscape, housing and urban life, and the materials we extract to support that version of life, are crisscrossed with human power relations.

We look on a concrete building, and on its material surfaces and interior spaces, and we are met by the 20^thcentury ‘extraction economy’ that gave us the concrete architectures of democracy. Or perhaps we see the environmental destruction concrete entailed. Or perhaps we see humankind’s deep space future, a late 21^stconcrete modernism built on the moon or passing asteroids, as envisaged by advocates of ‘The New Space Industrial Age’.

The confluence, and divergencies, of these stories of habitation have affected how we think of planetary space, environmental change, and emergent climate chaos. The technological possibility of 3D printing lunar concrete, holds out the possibility of stabilising, and then exporting, current modes of political economy into a space future, by envisaging the earth as merely a set of exhaustible economic assets. Outer space here takes on the dynamics of the earthly UN Global Commons – ‘free’ spaces that are largely beyond the democracy of nation states and the effective regulatory grasp of international law.

Technological and military organisation have long been extensions of the existing power of the monarch and state into new territories, material and human support for the search for private profit. Meanwhile, back at the planetary level, the progressive associations of concrete Modernism have run into the wall: progress is now encircled by increasingly ‘unseasonal’ weather patterns, and undermined by the daily media outpouring of post-democratic political sentiment. Concrete culture now echoes the mid 20^th century observations of Karl Polanyi. But when capitalism faces off against democracy today, it chooses what Colin Crouch dubbed ‘post-democracy’, before stretching itself out across future space.

Stills from recorded material for the film Concrete: The Great Transformation, mainly recorded under Lunar Concrete, 2019: