We are delighted to share that the first NAARCA Art Commission has been awarded to Danish artist Rikke Luther.
Over the course of two years (2022-24), Rikke Luther will embark on a research project entitled More Mud which will include residencies at Baltic Art Center (Sweden) and Skaftfell – Center for Visual Art (Iceland) and research trips to Svalbard, Finland, and Greenland.
More Mud for Nordic Alliance of Artists’ Residencies on Climate Action, NAARCA has its roots in Luther’s PhD Concrete Aesthetics: From Universal Rights to Financial Post-Democracy and will be a part of the Post Doc The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System under ‘Queen Margrethe’s and Vigdís Finnbogadóttir´s Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ocean, Climate, and Society’ (ROCS), The GLOBE Institute, Danish Natural History Museum and Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, Copenhagen University.
Rikke Luther’s current work explores the new interrelations created by environmental crisis as they relate to landscape, language, politics, financialisation, law, biology and economy, expressed in drawn images, photography, film, and pedagogical strategies.
The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System is an art practice-based research project, which examines the new ‘mud-scapes’ in Iceland, Greenland, and Denmark, focusing on the social, political, and bio-chemical effects, of their motion.
For millennia, static muds facilitated cultural exchanges across legal boundaries. Warming global temperatures result in their motion. Melting glaciers and inland ice result in mud. Ancient mud-flats and swamps reclaim space as human occupation recedes. Permafrost melts and sinks; land slips; lakes recede, and their beds collapse. Swelling muds slide toward the oceans, helping to facilitate the increasingly garbled circulations of the Earth System.
Luther’s project explores ‘The Social-Organisational Effects of Ocean-Land Muds in Motion’ and ‘The Bio-Communicative Effects of the Ocean-Land Muds in Transition’, as part of the larger attempt to build a new ethical and aesthetic public language capable of communicating the crisis within the Earth System.
Featured Image: Overspill: Universal Map, Atmosphere, 2016
