How do Earth’s natural media “archives” offer up evidence of environmental degradation and climate change that can be mobilized in making public truth claims? What challenges stand in the way of acting upon such claims, especially within legal forums burdened by the demand to prove direct causality?
Susan Schuppli’s presentation draws upon her research-based artistic inquiries investigating the ways in which environmental systems operate as vast information networks that are recording and transmitting the signals of pollution and global warming, and seeks to reflect upon these and other related questions. Central to her research is the concept of “material witnessing,” whereby rearrangements of matter not only offer up evidence of events but also come to expose the contingency of witnessing: soliciting questions about what can be known in relationship to that which is seen or sensed; about who or what is able to bestow meaning onto things; and about whose stories will be heeded or dismissed. As a conceptual imperative and practical project her aim is ultimately to relink the material world and its affordances with the space of the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political.