Visual Culture Seminar

Caitlin Berrigan will present her process and research behind recent videos, sculptures, and texts that reimagine relations among human and more-than-human life forms through the lens of deep time. Central to the talk will be the artist's ongoing research project, Imaginary Explosions (2018-present)—a speculative worldbuilding cosmology that blurs research science with art and fiction. Focusing on communication with geologic subjects through various technologies, sensory modalities, and mutual alliances, the project explores how human and mineral subjectivities are entangled, emphasizing moments when the earthly asserts its agency in the political sphere. Her work speculates on the idea of becoming mineral and enlists sensory modes to attune to geological animacies, while the notion of deep time offers a critical lens to think beyond the time scale of the human. Berrigan draws connections across ecological disasters and various scales of violence and contamination, along with personal histories that are enfolded in earth histories. She projects imaginary landscapes onto existing ones to propose alternative geological temporalities and affinities, enlisting embodied knowledge towards ecological reparation and the subversion of dominant power structures.

Related links:

• https://joanlosangeles.org/caitlin-berrigan-cassandra-with-a-flood-in-her-mouth
• https://www.redcat.org/events/2023/cassandra-with-a-flood