Night Drifts Above the Earth

“Night has fallen. Heaven and earth have melted into one.”
Georg Büchner, Lenz 1839

While this summer, as in previous years, countless wildfires are destroying vast tracts of forests and habitats in the landscapes of Canada, Australia, California, Greece, Italy, Spain, Turkey or Siberia and the melting of the Arctic icebergs and permafrost in Alaska inexorably progress, Dennis Del Favero embarks on a series of seminal works that render the implications of such planetary destruction and the wider implications of global warming palpable. The conceptual dimensions of his audio-visual pieces assembled in the exhibition provide a critique not only of dystopian climate trauma Cine-spectacles, but brilliantly combine an environmentalist sensibility with a pessimistic optimism, as far as one can be these days. The digitally animated installations unfold scenarios of disaster that radically break also with the sublime aesthetic celebrated in 19th century art on the eve of industrialization. Although an awareness of a tipping point in the development from rural towards urban and industrialized societies became already apparent in the landscape paintings of Romanticism, its visual language was directed at the aesthetic pleasure of keeping a distance from the spectacle of natural disasters, often staged with similar elegy as smoking factory chimneys towering the horizons or the glow of fire from the iron-producing industry as a beacon of the expanding cities. Penumbra I instead places the visitor in a spatially perceptible situation in which it appears almost impossible to claim for oneself a safe viewing position. Virtually surrounded by a 3D-animated forest landscape, one becomes close witness of an emergent forest fire whose powerful and rapid expansion one cannot escape. The approaching flames, flying sparks and the suction of the draught created by the raging fire enhanced by the sounds of burning wood provoke an existential moment, an immersive experience of anxiety that envisions not only the proximity but also the forces of climate breakdown as a slow cancellation of the future as Mark Fisher already identified, the historical situation of the so-called Anthropocene a decade ago. Del Favero’s concept for a physical encounter with the forest’s suffering by the stresses of human impact in Penumbra I triggers as much a disturbing psychological effect. Despite, or perhaps precisely because of, the abstracting black-and-white projected 3D-animation, the moving image sequence – enhanced by an emotionalized reciting voice – conveys a sense of the psychic state of deep cultural anxiety about the future for the planet and human existence.

Penumbra I, the title of the work, has been adapted from a medical context. It describes a cerebral infarction, precisely the area of tissue immediately adjacent to the zone of the infarct core that still contains viable cells. From a clinical point of view, the penumbra corresponds to the area of the brain where the risk of an irreversible infarction can be located. In the penumbra, a cascade of pathogenetic mechanisms takes place, which leads to the secondary involvement of other tissue sections in the infarct. Characterized as inflammations and the death of cells, these physiological processes can metaphorically be associated with the extinction of complete environments such as the rain forests or the oceans, complex eco-systems that sustain the “critical zone” providing the atmosphere for terrestrial life as featured visualized also in Ellipsis (2023) by animation of the water vapor formations surrounding the globe when seen from outer space. As the semantic of Penumbra conveys, not only the immediately affected areas will be destroyed by “infarcations” of anthropogenic pollution, but they will have cascading planetary impacts on the overall living conditions and accelerate the approach to the so-called tipping-points that bring ruin to entire parts of the globe, turning parts of continents into uninhabitable zones due to droughts, heat, flash floods, rising sea levels enhancing existing social inequalities. Since closely entangled with the economic conditions of industrial extractivism, all these areas “link up in one way or another as interconnected strands of political ecology”, as T. J. Demos has shown in his ongoing analysis of the intersection between environmental disasters and worldwide exacerbating sociopolitical and economic crises.

It is noteworthy, that the cinematic artwork Penumbra I uses artificially intelligent computer graphics. The visual sequences are based on empirical wildfire data and on the features of an existing geolocated landscape that allows the viewers to interactively navigate a software generated scenario using motion tracking of their gaze and movements. While following the visual cycle a voice-over recites passages from Georg Büchner’s Lenz, a novel published in 1836 posthumous to Büchner’s early death, with a captivating emotional intensity, immersing the visitors of the installation in the violent circumstances of “our problematic future.” This audiovisual setting reveals a proximity to the scientific research practices that inspired Georg Büchner to the visionary explorations of his literary works. Lenz is a breathless account of a self-dissolution in which a human abyss opens up, a physiology absorbed in poetry. It is an account on the nervous system of a state of insanity that mirrors Büchner’s studies in medicine. Penumbra is not intended for aesthetic reasons alone, but results from scientific explorations related to the current phenomena of mega wildfires. The “unpredictable behavior, monumental scale, extraordinary speed and ability to create their own weather system” of their catastrophic dimensions indicate that the impact of global warming has reached an entirely “new paradigm” as it were, as these fires rage with unprecedented temperatures and fuel the flames in such dynamic way that they get carried into the crowns of the trees and make them travel at extreme speed cross-country. Funded by the Australian Research Council in 2021, Dennis del Favero pursues his research on these phenomena with a prestigious Laureate Fellowship for his project Burning Landscapes which allows him to collaborate with a team AI, computer and fire and climate scientists at international universities to develop artificial intelligent visualizations of the new dimensions of blazing wildfires that make their behavior more predictable in order to save lives.

Also, the 3D-video animation Medusa (2022), inspired by Theodore Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818), immerses the viewers in the vastness of a grey and turbulent oceanic landscape. Gigantic waves arch up to the edge of the screen and put them in the position of seemingly defenselessly at the mercy of the maritime force. The stereo of the single-channel, 4-minute duration video enhances the dramatic impact of the images by the sound of the ominous waves. In the background the noise of a possible rescue helicopter can be heard, alongside fragments of radio calls of Syrian refugees in a boat on the Mediterranean Sea. A short scene fading in at the end of the sequence, shows the edge of an Arctic or Antarctic ice cap as large chunks detach from it and plunge into the sea. Again, it is the title of the work, Medusa, suggesting a notion of loss and extinction, resulting from destruction, reinforcing the experience of the effects of environmental ruin and its nexus to climate-driven mass displacement and forced migration.

Taking up Georg Büchner’s proposal for a social contract that he published with a call for revolution in a pamphlet that was distributed on the streets and assigned to the epoch of Vormärz (1815 to 1848), a time, when many young people demanded more freedoms such as the right to have a political say, Del Favero unfolds a contemporary panorama of the world’s ontology that can be read as a scientifically grounded diagnosis of the forces in the face of the anthropogenic destruction of the living sphere that demand an environmental contract not only for the human kind, but for multispecies in the face of a much more rapidly than anticipated advancing global warming.

Accordingly his Medusa is inspired by Danton’s Death, a psychologically and politically acute play, accounting for the coming time of political and social upheaval well ahead of Büchner’s contemporaries. In the same way as Büchner’s work radically criticizes the overachieving industrial society of his time, in which success and profit often took precedence over the common good, Medusa both, intellectually and emotionally, can be read as a challenge to dominant distributions of the sensible. In this sense, the criticism of Büchner’s Lenz and also Danton’s Death are relevant today, because the pressure to survive continues to be great in the era of mass-extinction. In a similar vein as Büchner interrelated his physiological explorations with a counter-poetics, Del Favero’s digital imageries and interactive installations are exceptional in their potential of merging knowledge production with his artistic imaginary revealing that there is nothing more timely or urgent to engage in as the effects of the human-made ecological crisis.

Penumbra as much as Medusa are far-ranging works that redefine nature as a site of aesthetic-conceptual speculation, taking social struggles against economic primacy seriously and considering developments in the rights-of-nature-discourse beyond the economic. These are observations that indicate ethical engagement, applying the methodologies of art that no longer prioritizes the aesthetic experience of contemplation alone, but rather enact an intersectionalist politics of aesthetics, that uncovers the complex interconnected strands of political ecology, climate injustice, disaster capitalism, colonial domination, socio-economic extractivism and environmental catastrophes. The constellation of works presented in this exhibition thus provides a comprehensive mapping of ecological demands and structural conflicts in their planetary dimension, while applying a speculative realism to convey a new sense of environmental responsibility that challenges science as much as the production of art, contributing to a future of environmental justice and multispecies flourishing.

Footnotes

1. See Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My life: Writing on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, London: Zero Books, 2014.
2. The exhibition „Critical Zones. The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth” curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in 2020 portrayed and traced the geophysically critical state of the earth, with the so-called critical zone, its permeable, near-surface layer. Bruno Latour extends the term to a critical, participatory relationship to our living world, whose threatened condition has reached an unprecedented scale in the history of the earth shaped by man, and whose historical context he has described as the New Climate Regime. See Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Critical Zones. The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2020.
3. See T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature. Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, Berlin & New York: Sternberg Press 2016, p. 12.
4. See Press release of the exhibition “Beyond the Night” at Galerie Brigitte Schenk, Cologne Sept. 2 – December 3rd, 2022.
5. See ibid.
6. Georg Büchner even founded the “Society for Human Rights”, which wanted to overturn political conditions. However, only a few like-minded contemporaries joined him. He therefore had to flee to Strasbourg, where he occupied himself with science. Although he died at the age of only 23 unexpectedly of typhoid fever, he created a substantial literary oeuvre and is considered an important representative of the Vormärz, a liberal-revolutionary movement (1815 to 1848).
7. See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics. The Distribution of the Sensible, Lahore: Mansell Publishing, 2004.