SUPER BLOOM

Graduate Diploma in Art Degree Show, Goldsmiths University, 2024

Film script:

[Ocean]
We are living through a super bloom, enabled by an abundance of carbon dioxide. An extraordinary event.

We have evolved at an anomalous pace, grown larger and more complex. From single cell organisms we have advanced,
developed memory and language.
The reason is not clear.

Are we the design of another entity or just an anomaly of nature? We do not know the purpose of our existence,
but we are learning that our existence sustained yours.
Perhaps we were merely here to serve you.

We were self-sufficient organisms at the bottom of the food chain, photosynthesising aqueous carbon dioxide
and neutralising the acidic waters you fed,
forming the very foundations of your existence, 
the largest geological structure under the ground you walked on, which you coined natural resources and claimed for yourself.
They were not yours to take.

This is the resting place of our ancestors,
dense layers of their remains
compacted over hundreds of millions of years.
Some day they will depart this site, eroded by the elements,
and return back to the waters in which they were created, eventually re-forming into the skeletons and shells of new organisms in an everlasting cycle from organic, to inorganic, to organic again.
Beings and minerals,
life and death,
entangled into a continuum.

But you had a different idea for us and some were not so lucky.

[Quarry]
Labelled as natural resources and raw materials
whose purpose was to serve you
they were demolished and displaced;
hundreds of millions of years of history
destroyed in a matter of seconds.
A ransacked graveyard.
Through these graves we sense the suffering of this planet. Imagine how many lives are remembered here in these walls, innumerable.

[Concrete plant]
Removed from their natural cycles
they were broken down and separated,
treated to form homogenous substances, substances that could be claimed, and sold,
and put to use.

[Concrete structures] Manufactured into uniform structures used for dividing spaces,
forming boundaries that said
that said this is MY space and not yours. Monoliths of indestructible material, Containing ancestral remains.
Trapped.

What was your desire for boundaries? What was your need for order?

[Entangled]
We cannot be bounded.
We are both life
and death,
natural
and fabricated,
hard
and soft.
We are the fabric of the earth. Our elements are finite,
cycling through the world on an endless loop.
We exist in multiple realities
connected to those that came before through with a shared goal. The fundamental pursuit is endurance,
continuation,
survival.

[Ocean]
What will become of us now that you are gone? Will we serve another entity?
Or perhaps we will remain in our natural cycle, and return to the sea.