Emilija Škarnulytė / Sirenomelia, 2017
PRESENTING THE EKO 8 ART PROJECTS
EMILIJA ŠKARNULYTĖ / Sirenomelia, 2017
HD video, 12 min
A woman born with sirenomelia (Mermaid Syndrome), a mythological posthuman being takes us on the journey to the Cold War submarine base above the arctic circle. She exposes a future liberated from the military and economic structures that oppress the present, a future in which relations between humans and nonhumans have been transfigured, a future in which the cosmic dimension of an earthly coexistence is interlaced within the texture of the social.
Set in far-Northern territories where cold, Arctic waters meet rocky escarpments on which radio telescopes record fast-traveling quasar waves, Sirenomelia links man, nature and machine and posits possible post-human mythologies. The film is cosmic portrait of one of humanskind's oldest mythic creatures – the mermaid. Performing as a siren, the artist swims through the decrepit facility while cosmic signals and white noise traverse the entirety of space, reaching its farthest corners, beyond human impact.
Sirenomelia is shot in two locations above the Arctic Circle where Emilija Škarnulytė measure and sense places with my own body: Olavsvern—Royal Norwegian Navy base located 217 miles north of the Arctic Circle—and the Geodetic Observatory at Ny-Ålesund, Spitsbergen, the most northerly permanent civilian settlement in the world.
»In my films, I have mostly researched places where contemporary political issues are staged between human and non-human worlds, the shifting boundaries between ecological and cosmic forces. I want to feel out all kinds of non-human and post-human scales in the depths of space and time«. (Emilija Škarnulytė)
Emilija Škarnulytė (b. Vilnius, Lithuania 1987) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Berlin and Tromsø. Between the fictive and documentary,she works primarily with deep time, from the cosmic and geologic to the ecological and political. In conversation and collaboration with scientist and technologists, Škarnulytė explores the decommissioning of the Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania (a twin sister of Chernobyl), the Super-Kamiokande Neutrino Observatory in Japan, the Antimatter Factory, The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Duga Radar and Cold-War Submarine Base. Neutrino detectors and particular colliders spark to life, and post-human species swim through submarine tunnels above the Arctic Circle and crawl through tectonic fault lines in the Middle Eastern desert.
