Archives of the Present-Future: Climate Change and Representational Breakdown (Avery Review, 2016) (original) (raw)

A dizzyingly convoluted phenomenon, climate change entails many (often correlated and at times seemingly contradictory) things happening in multiple places at once, at varying rates and scales, and with myriad types and degrees of consequence. In addition to certain unprecedented material-environmental conditions, it thus poses profound representational dilemmas. From what vantage point might we engage this multi-scalar/-temporal/-dimensional/-disciplinary “shadow that is no less ominous because it is formless and obscure,” to borrow Rachel Carson’s analogy for pesticide contamination from 1962? The existing visual culture of climate change—brimming with depictions of polar bears atop waning ice, apocalyptic landscapes, and satellite views from above—adheres largely to an illustrative mode, despite the incongruousness and even muteness of such a manner in the face of newly complex entanglements between the human and nonhuman, not to mention the kind of attritional, “slow violence” associated with climate change. Using the artist Amy Balkin’s ongoing A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting (2011-) as a counter-model, this essay considers forms of representation that dwell in the “sticky materiality of practical encounters” (Anna Tsing), moving across scales and registers in order to forge not seamless perspectives, but rather, ones that are adequately fractured and muddy.