Dust & Flow: Muds, Movement, Time, Scale by Rikke Luther
Rikke Luther’s new film, Dust & Flow: Muds, Movement, Time, Scale is a response to a NAARCA-funded commission, and has been produced with additional funds from Art Hub Copenhagen and the Swedish Arts Council.
Dust & Flow forms a part of The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System, Luther’s Novo Nordisk-funded post-doc, based at Queen Margrethe’s and Vigdis Finnbogadottir’s Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ocean, Climate, and Society (ROCS).
The Ocean-Lands project is examining the social, political, and bio-chemical, implications of rapid movements in the planet’s new ‘mud-scapes’. Dust & Flow has drawn together new scientific research on sedimentary flows, eDNA, and ‘deep-time’, with personal responses to these moving landscapes, to examine how humans are attempting to make sense of impossibly rapid changes in the Earth System.
The film moves across the island ‘mud-scapes’ of Gotland, Iceland, and Svalbard, interweaving up-to-the-moment science with our culturally-limited understandings of history and time. The script accompanying Luther’s visual engagements with these fast-mutating landscapes is voiced by the actor David Bateson, performing the roles of the narrator, Luther, Luther’s inner dialogue, and two subsidiary characters.
In addition, Rikke Luther has created three large-scale ‘wall-drawings’, printed on canvas to be shown in conjunction with Dust & Flow. These works draw on NAARCA-funded site-visits and Luther’s primary research for The Ocean-Lands project funded by Novo Nordisk Foundation and ROCS.
Introduction from the Artist
Watch the Film
The film was only available to view during our limited run Online Exhibition (May – July 2024).
About the Artist
Rikke Luther is a Danish artist based in Copenhagen. Her current work explores the new interrelations created by environmental crisis as they relate to the Earth System. Those relation compass themes related to landscape, language, politics, financialisation, law, biology, geology and economy, that expressed in drawn images, photography and film.
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), Skaftfell Art Center (Iceland), Artica Svalbard (Norway) and research trips to Finland, and Greenland. From these field studies, NAARCA has commissioned a new film to be completed in Spring 2024.
More Mud 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.
