PHAIDRA – Collezioni digitali

‘Cracking the Surface’ is a metaphor that resonates deeply with the contributions to this special issue that began from an interest to compose with and better grasp the movements and interrelationships between, from and across, above and below ground. How to write them up together in a way that is mindful both of human and more-than human actors, materials animate and inanimate, and their respective power relationships?
Focusing on matters extracted, others dumped, ground that falls, water that rises, divers that delve, pollution that spills and percolates, villages that collapse and buildings that rise, contributions in this special issue reassemble and reassess the very relationships between above and below ground.
To give depth to the surface, contributions from architects, art historians, anthropologists, cultural theorists, film makers, historians, photographers, and a sound artist engage with the volumetric perspective and explore the possibilities that cracks, holes, or pits – as mines, excavations, pits, or water reservoirs – confer conceptually when analyzing the existential threats to our collective conditions of existence on this planet.

Summary:

CRACKING THE SURFACE: FLOWS BETWEEN ABOVE AND BELOW GROUND

Cracking the Surface
Notes from the Editors
Simone M. Müller, Livia Cahn

Notes from the Demolition Edge
Kris Decker

Thinking with Gaps between Coal and Post-Coal in an Eastern German Mining District
Felix Schiedlowski

Excavation | Elevation: Above and Below Ground in Nairobi
James Muriuki, Constance Smith

Sensing a Lagoon: Distance, Care, and Cormorants
Noemi Quagliati

Subterranean Reverberations and the Horror of the Chemical Sublime
Caroline Ektander

Translucence
Some Notations on Sediments, Amber, Toxic Chemicals, and the Possibility of Returns
Sebastian Lundsteen, Korana Jelača

Rotor – Entangled Matter
Michaël Ghyoot, Arne Vande Capelle, Victoria Van Kan, Tom Schoonjans

We are Tectonic!
A Queer Geophysics for Intra-Solidarities and Resisting the Cloud Regime
Helen Pritchard, Femke Snelting, Seda Gürses, Jara Rocha, Miriyam Aouragh

When the Ground Drops
Sinkholes and the Verticality of History
Simone M. Müller

GENERAL SECTION

“Demasiado Poco Homenaje”: The Eva Perón Tomato and Absence within Living Memorials
Hailey Tennant, Mark Rhodes

Narrating the Dead in the Anthropocene
Hesitation and Existential Pluralism in Karl Ove Knausgård’s Novel Series The Morning Star
Mikael Schultz Rasmussen

Cristina Brito. Humans and Aquatic Animals in Early Modern America and Africa
Pietro Daniel Omodeo