Site in progress, more projects coming soon!
Site in progress, more projects coming soon!
FOR THE LOVE OF CORALS
Levy has followed Project Coral since late 2017 as a case study of new paradigms for multispecies living, environmental conservation and natural history that are emerging in the wake of the Anthropocene. As a model of a sensitive ecological unit that comprises a multispecies assemblage, coral demonstrates how individual beings are not separate from their environment but, on the contrary, by their sheer existence constitute environments for other beings and contribute to all surrounding ecosystems with complex and far-reaching effects. Project Coral expands that assemblage to include scientists, aquarists and a range of human and non-human actants. The physical form of coral also subverts the canonised animal, vegetal and mineral categories of natural history, which are embedded to the public displays of the Horniman itself. Levy examines how this architectural context of a museum with a living collection — which still echoes the Enlightenment values of human mastery over nature — can become a base for a project that might exemplify a collaborative multispecies survival endeavour.
For the Love of Corals is a cinematic inquiry that focuses on the daily labour of caring for endangered beings to resuscitate them from their imminent human-induced extinction. The technology of the ad hoc laboratory; scientific knowledge; the complexity of marine ecologies; and the intimacy of providing care converge in the precision of sustaining coral IVF. Whilst keeping the coral in captivity is, dishearteningly, the fundamental condition of Craggs’ research, the scientists and the coral also become entangled in sharing a space for living, working and world-making, expanding the range of possible worlds in common.
Craggs’ project and its setting within a museum provide an illuminating lens through which to examine the colonial Western notions of human exceptionalism that have justified the irresponsible exhaustion of the Earth and its life forms. Linking Craggs’ ongoing endeavour with historically significant artefacts in the Horniman archive and collections, For the Love of Corals weaves together a range of narratives, perspectives and temporalities to address the registers and frameworks in which we have sought to understand life on Earth, and to think towards a new paradigm for multispecies living.
A film by Sonia Levy
Edited by Sonia Levy and Sam Smith
Soundtrack and located sound by Jez Riley French
Music by Georgia Rodgers
Distal theories, performed by Two New Duo: Ellen Fallowfield (cello) and Stephen Menotti (trombone), Partial Filter, performed by David Powell (tuba)
Coral egg and embryo development timelapses by Jamie Craggs and Sonia Levy
Special thanks to: Jamie Craggs; Project Coral: Michelle Davies, Chloé Priestland, Keri O’Neil; and The Horniman Museum and Gardens: Alison McKay and Connie Churcher, Emma Nicholls and Jo Hatton, Henry Rowsell; Filip Tydén, Nella Aarne and Sam Smith, Jez Riley French, Alexandra Arènes and Soheil Hajmirbaba, Anna Ricciardi, Ayesha Keshani.
For the Love of Corals was produced with the support of Obsidian Coast and Fluxus Art Projects
COROLLARY PROJECT
FOR THE LOVE OF CORALS: AN ECOLOGY OF PERHAPS
IN COLLABORATION WITH MARTIN SAVRANSKY
For the Love of Corals: An Ecology of Perhaps are polyphonic writings and readings taking as their starting point Derek Walcott’s famous poem, The Sea is History (1979), to weave together artist Sonia Levy's research at the Horniman Museum and Gardens for her film For the Love of Corals, with ruminations by the philosopher Martin Savransky on the precarious lives of corals in the ecological hold of a perhaps, of the faint possibility of inhabiting the Earth otherwise.
The Great Barrier Reef off Cairns, Australia, has seen one of its warmest summers in 2020, and with it, yet another mass coral bleaching event. Some of the features of the polyphonic composition and text are connected and respond to near real-time sea temperature data from Cairns collected by NOAA Coral Reef Watch.
The text and sound provides continuities and resonances to its visual inquiries. How to inherit the precariousness of our earthly present? How to sustain endangered worlds and stories? How to tell stories in uncertain times? How to attend to the interstices where lives and worlds are made inside and in spite of ongoing devastation, bleaching and extinction?
Developed for the online occurrence of Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics exhibition, curated by Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel, Martin Guinard, and Bettina Korintenberg, at Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe (ZKM)
Martin Savransky work in the interstices between philosophy, the geo- and environmental humanities, and critical social thought, Martin's research critically probes processes of planetary change and unruly social life on unstable terrain. His work seeks to expand the imagination by exploring how histories of imperialism and colonialism have shaped contemporary planetary and ecological transformations, and how an attentiveness to modes of thought and practice outside the territory of Modernity and Progress might inspire other ways of inhabiting the earth. Martin Savransky is the is Director of the Centre for Critical Global Change and Convenor of the MA Ecology, Culture & Society at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Produced with the support of the ZKM, Hertz-Lab, Christian Lölkes and Dan Wilcox
Voices: Sara Rodrigues, two anonymous contributors
Field Recordings: Sonia Levy
Or click on the image above
COMPANION CONTENT
CORAL AND ALGAE, BLUE AND UNBLUE BY STEFAN HELMREICH [presentation]
A commentary on For the Love of Corals for The Camille Diaries, online Symposium, Art Laboratory Berlin, September 26, 2020 accompanying the exhibition The Camille Diaries: Current Artistic Positions on M/otherhood, Life and Care curated by Regine Rapp and Christian de Lutz
(28 August - 4 October 2020).
Stefan Helmreich is an anthropologist who studies how scientists in oceanography, biology, acoustics, and computer science define and theorize their objects of study, particularly as these objects — waves, life, sound, code — reach their conceptual limits.
Stefan Helmreich is the Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
FOR THE LOVE OF CORALS: LIFE IN THE RUINS OF THE MUSEUM [publication]
Published in Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth Edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, The MIT Press
Artists and writers portray the disorientation of a world facing climate change.
This monumental volume, drawn from a 2020 exhibition at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, portrays the disorientation of life in a world facing climate change. It traces this disorientation to the disconnection between two different definitions of the land on which modern humans live: the sovereign nation from which they derive their rights, and another one, hidden, from which they gain their wealth—the land they live on, and the land they live from. Charting the land they will inhabit, they find not a globe, not the iconic “blue marble,” but a series of critical zones—patchy, heterogenous, discontinuous.
With short texts, longer essays, and more than 500 illustrations, the contributors explore the new landscape on which it may be possible for humans to land—what it means to be “on Earth,” whether the critical zone, the Gaia, or the terrestrial. They consider geopolitical conflicts and tools redesigned for the new “geopolitics of life forms.” The “thought exhibition” described in this book opens a fictional space to explore the new climate regime; the rest of the story is unknown.
Contributors include
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Pierre Charbonnier, Emanuele Coccia, Vinciane Despret, Jerôme Gaillardet, Donna Haraway, Joseph Leo Koerner, Timothy Lenton, Richard Powers, Simon Schaffer, Isabelle Stengers, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Jan A. Zalasiewicz, Siegfried Zielinski
For the Love of Corals — shown here as part of the public programme Architecture of the Enclosed Sea. Between Aquaria and Marine Protected Areas, curated by Louise Carver and co-developed by the TBA21–Academy and maat in the context of the exhibition Aquaria – Or the Illusion of a Boxed Sea