Sonic Acts & Radio Web MACBA Podcast on Dark Ecology
Before he left for the Dark Ecology Journey, Arie Altena contributed to Radio Web MACBA’S fourth episode in the OBJECTHOOD podcast series. This podcast is about objects, but more importantly, it is about some of the recent theories that offer new conceptualisations of objects in contemporary philosophy and art. In this episode, we go underground, but also under water, where development clashes with strange hyperobjects such as poison, where geology meets politics, where horror meets daily life. OBJECTHOOD #4 explores the slippery materiality of untraceable objects: from the arsenic poisoning the wells of Bangladesh as told by Nabil Ahmed, to Arie Altena's account of the superstition surrounding the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, or the bizarre biology of the vampire squid from hell in a passage of Vilém Flusser’s ‘Vampyroteuthis Infernalis’ read by AGF. Timeline 00:16 Introduction 08:48 Nabil Ahmed: Arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh 15:32 Forensic Architecture 17:13 Arsenic in the history of toxicology 23:36 The devil in the water 24:55 How arsenic poisoned the water 26:31 Perspectivism 29:42 A pharmakon par excellence 35:17 Arie Altena: The Kola Superdeep Borehole 39:07 Yuri Smirnov and the legacy of the Kola Superdeep 40:57 The well to hell myth 47:37 Excerpt of Vilém Flusser’s 'Vampyroteuthis Infernalis', read by AGF (Antye Greie-Ripatti) Listen to OBJECTHOOD #4 here. Curated by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros and produced for Radio Web MACBA in collaboration with Dark Ecology / Sonic Acts. Arie Altena previously published the Field Notes article Drilling Deep / Knowledge from Underground, find it here.