review

Matterlurgy

First published by Art Monthly, January 2022

Hydromancy, John Hansard Gallery, 1 November 2021 – 31 January 2022

Hydromancy, 2021, a deeply mesmeric film by British artist duo Matterlurgy (Helena Hunter and Mark Peter Wright), floods its opening screen with an impossibly blue tide of rippling liquid. Capturing the agitated contents of an aquarium populated by coral specimens, this deceptively simple interplay of glimmering surfaces and hidden depths provides a neat visual shorthand for both the illuminations and opacities produced by scientific research, a sentiment gently explored by this work’s compelling fusion of acute documentary objectivity with the lulling disorientations of a liquid light show.   

Drawing parallels between divinatory mysticism, specifically the prediction of future events foretold by the behaviour of water – from glimpsing omens in the ripples of a pond to portents in cups of tea – and the scientific consideration of the ocean as a potentially salvific agent in our surging climate emergency, the term ‘hydromancy’ here alludes to the exchanges of empirical evidence and hopeful speculation that underscore our last-ditch attempt to save the planet from ecological collapse. 

Commissioned by John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, and Onassis Stegi, Athens, the work forms one component of ‘Weather Engines’, an exhibition project by curator Daphne Dragona and media theorist Jussi Parikka scheduled for 2022. But it is certainly Hydromancy’s timely premiere, both online and onsite at JHG, coinciding with the COP26 Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, that affords the film its peculiar exigency, as international leaders waffle through hollow promises of emissions responsibilities while placing greater faith in the role of the world’s oceans as ‘carbon sinks’ (that is, natural repositories for the excess carbon catalysing global warming).      

Parikka’s own research has recently strayed into a consideration of ‘labs’ as intricately networked and complexly funded sites of knowledge production, an interest clearly shared by Matterlurgy, who shot their film entirely on location at the University of Southampton’s National Oceanography Centre.

 Flowing seamlessly between static observances of on-site infrastructure and the mercurial allure of animated matter, Hydromancy forwards a kind of ecologically grounded psychedelic cinema, alternating between the procedural realities of ocean reconnaissance and the heady trance states of science-fictive conjecture. A submersible sinks into a pool of shallow green sea water, inducing the dream vision of a digitally rendered topographical survey, its floating camera navigating the serpentine corridors of a deep-water trench. Delicate fronds of coral flutter past an oceanographic chart that resembles the creeping encrustations of an alien lichen. Algae and phytoplankatons swarm in bubbling sample jars. Underwater footage captures sunlight cascading into shoals of lens flares, reminding us that the camera itself is a situated and non-neutral agent in this process of documentation, its own findings refracted through its partial, lenticular form. 

Yet Hydromancy forgoes any didactic narration of its technologically complex apparatus in favour of an enveloping amniotic hum, staccato litanies of chemical presence (‘phosphorous… nitrogen… oxygen…’), and siren-like utterances that haunt its soundtrack with the questions ‘What more can I say? What more can you know?’, drawing us into a catatonic state in which the frustrations and inertia of climate activism bristle against the hope for new data, new solutions.    

Science fiction’s heaviest heavyweights – notably Kim Stanley Robinson and Neal Stephenson – have, in recent years, turned their attentions to an urgently sensitised and all-encompassing literature on climate activism. Exploring the legislative complexities of international diplomacy and oligarchic interventionism, they have produced a mode of fictional problematisation we might term, following McKenzie Wark, a ‘realism of the possible’. 

But it is, for this reader at least, the imperfect and peculiar character of the ocean’s evolving role in our climatological crisis that has provided speculative fictions’ most pointed and catalytic images of late. For William Gibson, the evolution of that horrid agglutination of microplastics and salt-bitten refuse known benignly as the ‘great pacific garbage patch’ forms a hostile frontier of climate migration. Chen Qiufan has vividly depicted the trade routes of a burgeoning e-waste industry in anticipation of fraught labour relations marring coastal towns on the south Chinese coast, while Rivers Solomon has unfolded a difficult counter-mythos of the middle-passage in which the unborn offspring of victims of the transatlantic slave trade populate the seas as subaquatic revenants of a poisoned modernity.  

Perhaps Hydromancy is best positioned as part of this emergent vocabulary of oceanic speculation. By tentatively alluding to the anticipated results drawn from the very matter of oceanic ecospheres, it sidesteps an all-too-easy solutionist narrative characteristic of human exceptionalism in favour of a humbler – dare I say more materially enchanted? – relationship with the sea and its as-yet-unknown function in our own indeterminate future.