Life at the Edges of Shifting Rhythms | Shezad Dawood and Mark Nutall

Undead Matter

Artist and filmmaker, Shezad Dawood speaks with social and geopolitical anthropologist Mark Nutall, who’s work is embedded in circumpolar rural communities, tracing the entanglements between climate change, extractive industries and identity of place. They discuss the accumulated residues, ecological cosmologies and shifting futures that have emerged from the deepest corners of the oceans, the icy subsurface and geological entanglements of Greenland’s complex landscapes and the lives they hold.
Kalaallit creation myths bubble up from liquid worlds below, told by Greenlandic storyteller Maria Kreutzmann, and the slow rhythms of Greenlandic Shark, thought to live up to 500 years, rub up against the past sci-fi imaginaries of icy frontiers, as the abandoned subterranean Cold War military base of Camp Century is revealed in the thawing ice and warming temperatures creates abundant, fertile pastures with rapid agricultural development.
Still imbued with ancient knowledges of kinship with its fragile ecologies, but now set against a backdrop of modernisation and new extractive industries, Shezad and Mark consider the dramatic shifting rhythms of these lands, where life-that-thrives takes on different meanings and temporalities.