Greenhouse member and Good Fire researcher Charlotte Wrigley gets fellowship at at the Panel on Planetary Thinking, hosted by Justus-Liebig University in Giessen, Germany.
Greenhouse member and Good Fire researcher Charlotte Wrigley recently swapped fire for ice to spend three months as a fellow at the Panel on Planetary Thinking, hosted by Justus-Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. The Panel offers research and art-orientated fellowships that approach planetary thought through a series of theoretical interventions: planetary materials, planetary spaces, and currently ongoing, planetary times. Charlotte’s project interrogates the concept of eternity in the Anthropocene, reading planetary times through the practice of cryobanking. Cryobanking is a method of frozen storage that promises to suspend time for its contents, ranging from storing seeds or items of value, to more practical applications that might resurrect extinct species or even reverse human death. Proposed as a solution to a planet seemingly out of control, cryobanking redefines what life – and death – means at a time of great upheaval.
The Panel on Planetary Thinking’s fellowship proposal is unique in that it pairs a scholar with an artist to produce an interdisciplinary project that can speak to both academic and public audiences. Charlotte found fruitful ground with the Austrian artist Christian Kosmas Mayer, whose artistic interventions into both human cryopreservation systems and de-extinction complemented her work on cold temporalities perfectly. They, alongside British geographer Adam Searle (with whom Charlotte also co-organised the Green Transitions workshop ‘Terraforming Terra’ at UiS), will end the fellowship with a two-day workshop titled ‘Frozen in Time: Interrogating Methods of Cold Storage and De-extinction’. The workshop will involve a keynote lecture from the sociologist Thomas Lemke, as well as a performance lecture by the artist Sophie Williamson titled ‘Future Eaters’. Charlotte, alongside Cambridge-based historian of science Alexis Rider, will run a creative and collaborative session that questions practices of cold archiving by working with the Hermann-Hoffman Academy of Giessen’s scientific collections. Workshop participants will curate new backstories for a selection of taxidermied birds, vials of sand, minerals, and geological instruments as a way to challenge the hierarchies of value and knowledge produced by the archive, culminating with presentations that will be filmed and deposited into the Arctic World Archive cryobank on Svalbard ‘for all eternity’.
Charlotte shares her fellowship with another artist–scholar pairing: the landscape architect Aisling O’Carroll, and the philosopher Lukáš Likavčan. Their co-organised workshop, titled ‘Reading the Earth and Stars: Field Methods for Narrating Geological and Cosmic Time’ will offer participants a chance to experience Frankfurt’s night sky observatory, as well as take part in a soil chromatography session. Aisling also produced a window installation at Giessen’s art gallery which reconstructed a historic glacial hut nicknamed ‘the temple of science’ due to its importance to the budding research field of glaciology in the 19th century. Her scale models of the hut and surrounding landscape were constructed using a scagliola technique which mimics geological material. The fellows share office space in a dedicated apartment for the Panel on Planetary Thinking, which also contains an excellently curated library.
The fellowship has been a chance for Charlotte to continue previous research on permafrost and de-extinction – her award-winning book on this work, Earth Ice Bone Blood, was released last year – and has allowed her to incorporate her thinking with ice into her current project on fire. In the past few years, there have been increasing reports of a worrying phenomenon occurring in the Arctic: zombie fires, where intense summer wildfires continue to burn underground in the organic-rich permafrost soils over the winter, only to re-emerge the following summer. Fire and ice might appear – on the surface at least – to be material opposites, but the existence of zombie fires as a direct result of the climate crisis call this assumption into question, and is something Charlotte plans on investigating in future research.