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As part of our exhibition program at Galerija Filodrammatica (Korzo 28/1, Rijeka), from April 3 to 24, American artist Caroline Sinders will present a solo exhibition Climbing Into The Wreck.
Before the official opening, which is scheduled for Thursday, April 3, at 7 PM, we will host a talk with the artist in the large hall of Filodrammatica, starting at 6 PM.
Caroline Sinders is an award winning critical designer, researcher, and artist. For the past few years, they have been examining the intersections of artificial intelligence, intersectional justice, harmful design, systems and politics in digital conversational spaces and technology platforms.
At the solo exhibition in Rijeka, Sinders will present several works that explore the oil industry of the Gulf of Mexico and their home state of Louisiana, drawing a connection to Rijeka’s oil industry and the specific infrastructure tied to this sector.
Below, you can read the artist’s statement for the Rijeka exhibition and learn more about the exhibited works.
Closeup of an abandoned rig, courtesy of the artist
‘Do not anchor or dredge’ sign, courtesy of the artist
»I don’t recall my first memory of “energy” because it surrounds us, and I don’t remember the first time I experienced the energy go out, because I was born at the tail end of hurricane season in New Orleans. I don’t ever remember being scared, because how can you fear something that comes every year? We greeted it, in a way, with a generational knowing, because if you grew up on the coast, you knew how to prepare. In a day, or two, rarely three, the power would come back on, and the storm had passed.
I knew energy was ephemeral, and I knew it came from somewhere. I knew it came from oil. I don’t remember the first time I thought about oil, either, but it was everywhere, all around us. Refineries surrounded the city, and rigs and pumps dotted the coast. Oil was in the swamps, and underneath the gulf’s sandy floor. We all knew not just one person but multiple people who worked in the oil industry, including members of my own family.
As a child, how do you understand, much less critique, a harm that is also a norm, especially if that norm engages in an invisible violence so large in scale, it’s impossible to see at your level, at the level of one? I thought I knew what violence looked like: the kind of violence you see in TV or movies, violence between people. But it was—and is—so much harder to see the violence people wreak on the climate, particularly in our efforts to find and create energy. It’s a bit easier now, as an adult, with the language of the climate crisis and the Anthropocene, to properly interrogate and document this invisible violence whose results are quite visible. Energy is a form of infrastructure, and oil has a physicality to it, in its existence as a liquid and in its methods of extraction.
But the rigs and refineries that surround my hometown are not always in use. When a company decides they are ‘done’, they leave but the rig, the refineries, the pumps, the metal- stays behind, often rusting, decaying, and leaking into our environments.
Climbing Into The Wreck is my way of documenting, and sensemaking with these large scale infrastructures that have crept into my home, like an invasive species, but one that society has built itself around, as a need, as energy. What is the future of these metal leviathans? What will happen to them, and what will happen to us, in the next 5, 10, or 100 years? Climbing Into The Wreck seeks to explore those questions, by using speculative fiction, documentary photography, and poetic mapping, and exploring Louisiana’s past, present and future with extractive oil and energy.«
— Caroline Sinders
ABOUT THE WORKS:
Screenshot, courtesy of the artist
The Rig, 01 is a mixed media video piece exploring a futuristic world in which the narrator, voiced by the artist, has overtaken an abandoned oil rig and reclaimed it as her new home. This world is one where climate change has accelerated, impacting Louisiana, the artist and the narrator’s home state. Louisiana, like many states along the Gulf of Mexico has an economy deeply intertwined with and dependent upon oil and petroleum services, even as that industry ravages the environment. Many small scale oil rigs dot swamps and the Gulf of Mexico, with many being ‘abandoned’ or closed by the companies, but still remain physically. In generating the videos and images used in this project, the artist found an abandoned oil rig, which serves as the rig in this video. In this video, the artist grapples with both grief and hope, situating resiliency, with nature retaking the oil rigs in the video, along with a barrel yielding magnolias, the flower of Louisiana.
Photo: Anna Ridler, Caroline Sinders, source: Ars Electronica (Flickr)
Cypress Trees is a one panel photographic project from a larger project by Caroline Sinders and Anna Ridler originally commissioned and realized as “Cypress Trees: A Beginning” which was supported by Ars Electronica’s AI Lab and the University of Edinburgh’s New Real program. Sinders and Ridler explored deforestation and the politics of climate change, memory and loss through a multi-media project including a 3,000 image dataset of Bald Cypress trees and an AI generated video which moves based on climate data. The Bald Cypress is often considered to be a symbol of the swamps in the American South, which would then be used to create a machine learning generated moving image piece. Bald Cypresses are trees that can live thousands of years (the oldest in North Carolina is believed to be over 2,600 years old) but are currently considered ‘threatened’. There’s a difficulty in building a dataset, but this difficulty is poetically urgent and necessary in documenting and creating data about these types of trees which are at risk. By recording it as much as we can – this can play into a wider conversation about what ends up in datasets are things that are easy to find, and how this becomes the norm. ‘As artists, we [Ridler and Sinders] both measure and take stock of how much work, research, ephemera goes into our practice, and we’ve tried to make those processes readable to others.’
Screenshot, courtesy of the artist
Ljubaznošću umjetnice
The presented photographs were taken by the artist on their many journeys filming and documenting the energy apparatuses across Louisiana. The artist visited working and decommissioned rigs, pumps and refineries in the Gulf of Mexico and bayous, and sites where scrap metal of rigs, including platforms, platform legs, vivisections of tankers and rigs, pipes, etc where stored in the water in bayous, on tug boats and tankers, or on dry land alongside the swamps, riverways and bayous. Even the discarded parts of the energy infrastructure in Louisiana will still be ‘held’ within the natural environment, in the water, or on land, close to nature preserves and cities.
☛Filodrammatica Gallery, Korzo 28/1, Rijeka
CONVERSATION WITH THE ARTIST:
Thursday, 3 April, at 6 PM
EXHIBITION OPENING:
Thursday, 3 April, at 7 PM
GALLERY OPENING HOURS:
Monday – Friday 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. | 5 – 8 p.m.
Saturday 5 – 8 p.m.
(closed on Sundays and public holidays; contact us to arrange another time of your visit)
CAROLINE SINDERS
