June 20, 2024 - June 30, 2024
Gallery in the Round, Makhanda
In this zone, deep on the floor of the ocean,
sea creatures float above shifting sands which gleam with gold, platinum, titanium, copper, cobalt, and manganese, minerals needed
for batteries, solar panels, wind-turbines, and electric vehicles on the grounds
above.
In the seventeenth century European ships
floated across the ocean in search of lands which enticed them with the promise
of gold that could be mined and fortunes made. The stars were used to guide
those ships and circling above in the darkness were planets that could not be
reached.
If the ship had sunk it might have come to rest on a seabed that held the very minerals it was searching for. This shadowy place is now threatened with the judder of collectors, the throbbing of tracked mining vehicles and pulsing bottom crawlers that spew toxic sediment plumes.
With deep-sea mining the silence will become loud with reverberations and the phantastic blind creatures who live there will become visible.
In this disrupted order in which place and space have been inverted, fish, now inedible, swim alongside spacecraft and our dreams are haunted by the sounds emanating from the abyss.
