Presentation by Hanna Husberg
Under the title "Fantastic Wednesday" on Wednesdays of the once-monthly seminar weeks, the PhD in Practice opens its doors to the Academy, friends, and other interested people. Program participants (individually or collaboratively) present their work in progress and experiment with different formats of presentation. Come and join!
The Free Sea explores the Maldives as a state constituted and unbound by the cultural, political, economic, and material flows of late capitalism and anthropogenic climate change.
Considering the impacts of sea level rise on the low-lying island nation, the essay film reflects on these islands as geo-bodies of identity, sovereignty, and prosperity threatened by the breaching of coastal and climatic thresholds. The forecast dissolution of these islands represents an ontological loss of definition, and crisis of representation for objects and subjects, registering across local and global scales and systems of knowledge.
As plans are proposed for the future resettlement of a diaspora without homeland, The Free Sea traces consequences of this crisis, considering potential positions for new human beings subject to a complex of technological and legal systems, but afforded rights by none.
Hanna Husberg (born in FInland) is a Stockholm-based artist graduated from ENSB-A, Paris, in 2007 and currently a Phd in Practice candidate at the Vienna art academy. Through a focus on the troubled atmosphere her practice investigates how we perceive, and relate to anthropogenic climate change. Recent projects include Human Meteorology (Galleri Mejan, Stockholm, Chateau de Chamarande, France), The Free Sea (HIAP, Helsinki) and the curatorial project Contingent Movements Archive and Symposium conceived together with Laura McLean (Maldives Pavilion, Venice, UNESCO, Paris). Hanna is also a participant of Frontiers in Retreat, a research platform in Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ecology in Contemporary Art coordinated by HIAP, Helsinki.