a space for encapsulation
2023, Video art
Credits:
The project was co-commissioned by Aberdeen Performing Arts and New Media Scotland's Alt-w Fund with investment from Creative Scotland.
Used media:
video (41 one-minute videos, whole duration – 41'00").
Description:
The project explores the traces of human impact on Scotland's coastal areas and the interweaving of industrial and natural artefacts. Shores are explored as places where multicellular organic life began its journey moving from ocean to land and which are at risk because of the rising water levels. Moreover, coastlines are also covered with long and short traces of human impact such as industrial, tourist, and defence structures, carbon fibres and trash. The project seeks to encapsulate these artefacts, highlight the impacts and focus on the formed anthropogenic/natural assemblages in coastal zones. The coastlines become a ruined museum of the processes of industrialisation and terraforming, hiding the extractivist and industrial nature of human activity under new layers of organicism and smooth destruction. In this way, this infrastructure is turned backwards by natural actors.

Artefacts were captured as 3D scans using photogrammetry technology in 12 places throughout coastal Scotland: Ardrossan, Saltcoats, Stevenston, Irvine, Footdee and Blackdog beaches in Aberdeen, Fraserburgh, Old Slains Castle, Foveran pillboxes, East Wemyss, Lundin Links, Edinburgh, and Siccar Point. Each object was encapsulated and researched with a camera in 3D space and was amplified by the captions with the artist's monologue connected to scanned entities.
Photogrammetry becomes a filter in the documentation of space, grasping its state in the isolated chamber of time. We might consider it as the next step of photography, but in contrast, it distorts, breaks and reveals the resistance of physical matter to algorithms in the process of creating a digital representation.
The project started as a rooting practice of making photogrammetries during my first months in Saltcoats after moving to the UK. It helped a lot to accept a new place and focus on the local issues and give this possibility to find interest in the research of the interweaving between industrial and natural.

In general, the video can be divided into 4 scenes:
1) "It all started on the shore", where I try to trace how organic life or better to say compounds originating in dangerous volcanic zones go into the ocean and then start their way back to land.
2) "Architecture as a shell" in which I compare architecture and infrastructure to a shell that people form around themselves and that people periodically shed. Here I consider both the infrastructure in place that shapes cities and the human relationship with water, and how humans then dump it and nature grabs it back and recycles it.
3) "Transient Traces" - in this part I'm looking for how human artefacts fit into the natural landscape, and how nature captures and recycles them, levelling the difference between the industrial and the environmental.
4) "The shore is the space of the solitude" - where I try to trace how organics and the carbon cycle manifest themselves in beached animals and summarize how human artefacts are granular compared to the time scale of the planet.