Rikke Luther
Postdoc
Intro
Rikke Luther is an artist and researcher. The current work examines the movements in the Earth System related to the environmental and biodiversity crises. The Post doc The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System builds on previous works exploring the interrelations between landscape, language, geology, oceanography, biology, politics, financialisation, law, and economics.
Research outputs take the form of film and large-scale drawn mappings, distributed in exhibitions, screenings, publications, and pod casts.
Brief project description
The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System is an art practice-based research project, examining ‘mud-scapes’ and the social, political, and bio-chemical, effects of their motion.
For millennia, ‘static muds’ facilitated cultural exchanges across legal boundaries. Those once secure muds are now in motion. Glaciers and inland ice melt, as mudflats and swamps reclaim space from human occupation. Permafrost melts and sinks, as elsewhere land slips, lakes recede and their beds collapse. Swelling muds slide toward the oceans, facilitating the increasingly garbled circulations of the Earth System.
The Ocean-Lands reflects on, and augments, work developing across other disciplines that are beginning to mark out a Venn diagram of intersecting concerns. At present, no single discipline spans the central intersection. The Ocean-Lands looks toward that future discipline, with the objective of contributing a new ethical-aesthetic public language capable of communicating the shifts occurring within the Earth System.
The project explores two, inter-related, questions: ‘The Social-Organisational Effects of the Ocean-Land Muds in Motion’ and ‘The Bio-Communicative Effects of the Ocean-Land Muds in Transition’. Each devolves into a series of interrelated sub-questions, or tributaries, reflecting the transitional, circulatory, and uncertain, nature of the developing mud crisis.
These questions, will be explored, and expanded on, in a continuous, iterative, process between academic and creative works, drawing on fieldwork in Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard, Gotland and Denmark. Artistic outputs will take the form of four large-scale visual-cognitive maps, an installation, a book, and narrative-orientated documentary film, with immediate target groups in art and academia and, more widely at the different medias of the public sphere.
2023-2024: Post Doc: The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System, under Prof Katherine Richardson at ‘Queen Margrethe’s and Vigdís Finnbogadóttir´s Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ocean, Climate, and Society’ (ROCS.ku.dk), Center for Marcoecology, Evolution and Climate (CMEC), The Globe Institute.
2022-2024: Research project More Mud for Art Hub under Nordic Alliance of Artists’ Residencies on Climate Action (NAARCA) is a part of the Post Doc. It includs working with institutions in Iceland (Skaftfell), Sweden (Baltic Art Center & GRASS Fellow, GRASS Fellow Programme Uppsala University, Campus Gotland), Denmark (Art Hub), Svalbard (Artica), Greenland (Narsaq International Research Station), Scotland and Finland on research, production, exhibitions and seminars.
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