From August 2024 till March 2025 I will be focusing on my Diploma work at the Academy of Media Art in Cologne. I'll be working on a multimedia installation featuring an experimental film projection and sculptures. The film revolves around a speculative version of the island Midway Atoll. On this ex-military base and natural park, located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, albatrosses visit once a year to mate and raise their chicks. This isolated species is going extinct due to the ingestion of plastic detritus contaminating the ocean.

 

In the CGI film, a flying camera takes you into an island that merges land and critters into a conglomerate—a body of bodies that are going extinct due to the impact of plastic pollution while, paradoxically, other bodies are thriving because of it. During the flight, we metaphorically dive into the albatross's belly, saturated with plastic, where violent power systems, desynchronized temporalities, and the multidimensionality and fugitivity of issues are articulated. By navigating through the island, I aim to guide the traveler/viewer through the dismantlement of the myth of wholeness—the myth that modern humans are built by their dissociated will of independence. The film will be projected on three screens to simultaneously highlight the necessity of plenitude, isolation, and emancipation while acknowledging the entanglement, dependency, and precariousness of the more-than-human world.

 

These times of fugitivity—a time that refuses to be utilized by capitalism—need allies to rewire the dissociated self into a state of consciousness that, in my view, requires, as a first step, mourning, loving, and grieving the loss. Mourning is an ethical stance towards the ongoing loss of living beings. The sculptures in the room will accommodate the traveler/viewer by providing an ergonomic seating figure while also encouraging interaction with the attentive, curious look of a traveler triggered by the film. The sculptures will be filled with plastic gathered from the Mediterranean Sea, with items typically found in the dead bellies of albatrosses, making the ally in the exhibition a trickster.