By: Sasha Engelmann, Caitlin Berrigan
In: Art Journal Open
Excerpt
Is there life after annihilation? Artist Caitlin Berrigan engages this question as a matter of necessity for geosocial existence and survival. The question also animates our mutual interests in deep time, the embodiments of fieldwork, and feminist approaches to technoscience. While the elemental zones through which we practice differ—I am a geographer who traces atmospheres and Caitlin follows the subterranean forces of rock and seismicity—our commitments to distributed networks of feeling and hybrid, technological forms of perception are resonant. Our work finds a common interface in the geohumanities, a discipline emerging from collaborations among geographers and artists.
We first met at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany, where Caitlin held a fellowship and was working on her first book. Later, when we were thousands of kilometers apart, we spoke about art and geography in relation to Caitlin’s project Imaginary Explosions—a collection of episodic videos, sculptures, and texts that explores geologic histories, sexual violence, transfeminist coalitions, and expanded forms of sensing and signaling. In 2018–19, Caitlin was the recipient of a commission from the Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities, University of London, which supported a collaboration with volcanologist Karen Holmberg as well as a new video episode in the Imaginary Explosions series. In our discussion, we discover fault lines and fractures, mineral accretions and sedimentations of subjectivity, epistemology and geology.
—Sasha Engelmann
