IAS Turbulence: Inhabitable Futures

Polly Gould

Polly Gould, Castle Rock and Mount Erebus, 2012 (coloured and mirrored hand-blown glass, watercolour on sand-blasted glass, 40 x 40 cm x D. 15). Courtesy of the artist.

 

Our turbulent times can be understood as made up of ruptures in the smooth continuum of histories and of taken-for-granted values. The associated conflicts concern who gets to tell the story and how it is told. There is turbulence too in our previously familiar weather patterns and in the stability of liveable conditions. The melting polar ice provides iconic images of the fact of climate change. There are different ways for us to tell this story, to get from the beginning to the end, from A to B.

I have an interest in landscapes that are at the limit of human habitation. I like to look for them in archives. I use ‘I’ not to assert an identity as a mark of authenticity but in order to own what I write as a point of view. I collect old magic lantern slides that seem visually or topically of interest. I make from these encounters artworks and narratives that mix fictional, historical, cultural, and scientific accounts.[i]

The archives of illustrious institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society and the Scott Polar Research Institute have provided me with access to documents and visual images of historical endeavours in exploration of extreme environments. The outmoded form of the magic lantern slide provides a past view of things, sometimes inscrutable. These archival materials and lantern images are most often Victorian or early twentieth-century in their orientation. The materials collected within them were first meant as documents of exploration, of travel, of colonial endeavours, of zoological and botanical collections. Nonetheless, an archive is not entirely static, and one can bring a sideways glance to its foundational intention in order to mobilise alternative perspectives.

In 1895 the meeting of the International Geographical Congress urged upon the scientific communities the view that the exploration of the Antarctic region was the greatest piece of geographical exploration still to be undertaken. The great prize was the South Pole. In those days, prior to the era of mass air travel, an Antarctic journey entailed a long sea voyage followed by sledging with dogs or on foot. Getting from A to B was time-consuming, and travel was for the few.

Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912) and his party reached the South Pole in January 1912, but they were not the first team to do so. The Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen had arrived in December 2011 and left an empty tent as a marker of their success. Scott’s party all perished, the last three of them freezing to death in a canvas tent of similar design. Edward Wilson (1872-1912) was among this tragic party. Alongside other roles he was the expedition artist. His subtle watercolours portrayed the never-before-seen landscape of Antarctica in pastel and rainbow-brilliant colours.

Viewing Wilson’s work in the archive, I understood how his process was interrupted by the freezing conditions that made painting in the open air impossible. I painted my own versions as distorted copies of his watercolours on glass to be reflected in my mirrored glass globes, creating the illusion of miniature worlds. My indirect, side-ways view of a place and time at a great remove was interpreted into anamorphic distortions. The anamorphic – an artistic technique in which distorted projections appear ‘normal’ only from certain positions or using particular mirrors or lenses – is like the sideways glance through the archive, or the transformative effect of science fiction upon social reality. As Donna Haraway writes, ‘The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion’.[ii]

The Edward Wilson archives are among those that hold the memory of a specific type of heroic dead, the memorialization of a particular kind of masculinity, of imperial exploration, of ethnographic judgments, of colonial exploitation. How to travel from these nineteenth-century pasts towards feminist futures? We might make the journey from A to B via the work of Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018). [iii] Her short story ‘Sur’ is hardly Science Fiction, more in the Alternative History genre, but it is certainly Speculative Fiction. Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble offers exactly this crossing over of Science Fiction, speculative fabulation, science and storytellers, to address the reimagining of the world.[iv] In the case of Le Guin’s ‘Sur’,  the speculation being is: what if it had been a party of women who had been the first to reach the South Pole, and non-Europeans at that? Le Guin was an admirer of heroic exploration narratives. (Her novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, is set in a world called Winter.) ‘Sur’ is a gentle but incisive parody of the masculine ambition for priority, first to the Pole (or first to the top). Le Guin’s women arrived there without difficulty, and decided to leave no trace.

Antarctica, the empty continent, is the only territory on Earth devoid of an indigenous human population, and has consequently been entirely available to fantasies of self-invention, colonial or otherwise. It figures as the unbuilt environment outside of human history, in stark contrast to the built environment of the human world (the northern polar region, contrastingly, has known the dwelling practices of indigenous people). Scientific polar stations in the Arctic and Antarctica are often at the forefront of experimental architectures. These extreme environments, of the polar regions or the high altitude of mountain tops, pose a challenge to our human capacity to provide shelter. Their landscapes host the expedition hut, the mountain refuge, and utopian cities of the mind. Bruno Taut (1880-1936) proposed in his Alpine Architecture of 1917 a utopian architecture built in coloured glass in the Alps, convinced of its socially transformative potential. Ironically, the modernist love-affair with glass enacted in our buildings of the last century has increased dependence upon energy-expensive air-conditioning, which contributes to the climate problem even as it tries to control the climate of our interiors. I have responded to Taut’s watercolours of these fantastical structures with my own miniature versions, titled Architecture for an Extinct Planet, built from stained glass and lantern-slides and featuring genres of animals such as birds of paradise or sea creatures.

Around mountains or tall buildings alike, the distorted change in airflow caused by thermal convections is one cause of air flight turbulence. Smooth air flights from A to B are disturbed by turbulence, sudden changes in the air pressure that make the plane judder and drop. The exponential increase during the twentieth century of fossil- fuelled flight, too, has contributed to CO₂ emissions and climate change that will in its turn increase incidents of severe turbulence for air travel.[v] Closed visions, stuck in a single perspective, seek a technological fix to the problem by modifying the design of the aeroplane, rather than addressing the cause by finding other ways to travel.  We need to evaluate the more or less seamless versions of reality against the more or less turbulent and contested versions, and ask to what extent the problem to be solved changes depending on what is included in or omitted from the frame. Working with turbulence means disrupting our habits of thought and world views.

As our ‘feminisms’ address the turbulence of the world as we find it, we are confronted with turbulence internal to the practices and ambitions of those feminisms. There is turbulence in the fluid dynamics of a changing feminism in which the category ‘women’ is contested. [vi] I feel the sudden jolt, the ruptures between generations of feminisms, the drop in altitude, as the aspiration for solidarity fails to connect but instead encounters pockets of defensive difference. Feminism is undergoing its own turbulent disruptions — diversity against unity, multiplicity against homogeneity. Can we allow for the contradictions rather than force consensus? Can we even constitute a viable ‘we’?[vii] Might shared aims rather than shared circumstance now determine what we have in common and who might constitute that shifting collegium of ‘we’? The feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti finds a way, and likes to repeat during her talks and in her writing, without negating the reality of difference and in the spirit of the politics of hope: ‘we are all in this together’.[viii]

We are in this now, this turbulence of climate change, not on Le Guin’s fictional planet called Winter, but in a warming world, a Summer, that in part is experiencing relentless heat and wildfires, disastrous and extreme weather patterns, storms and flooding, and thinning air. We are in a world where fact and truth are refashioned by fantasists and deniers, and in which previously glacial Greenland is transformed into a newly temperate green land, and a real-estate speculator posing as a statesman makes preposterous demands to buy a country from a nation that has no right to sell it – and then petulantly photoshops his branded tower onto a picture of the place. Trump’s graphic tweet is as jarring as a sci-fi image, seeming to borrow the science fiction aesthetic strategy that splices together apparently distinct themes or images in incongruous montages or juxtapositions.

In our present time, the greatest piece of geographic work still to be undertaken is the discovery of a sustainable planetary future; the great prize, an inhabitable world. What is needed is the willingness to bring the optical illusion of science fiction to the social reality of this world, to bring different ways to tell this narrative, via disruptive shifts from fact to fiction, from past to future. Who gets to tell the story and how it is told, determines how we will get from A to B, how we will travel from our current turbulent time towards our inhabitable future.