Divergent horizons
Radicante Navigable Residence - LiquenLab, Chile.
Work in progress - 2021-2022
Collaboration: Demian Ferrari
How many horizons are possible to distinguish? Is it just an imaginary line that separates the land from the sky or the land from the sea as juxtaposed elements? Can the perception be the same in ancient times that in today's hyper-technological times? In the Global South and in the hegemonic Europe? Could we dismantle our perception and identify other ephemeral and fragile horizons that territorialize us? Could the horizons dialogue with other non-human agencies in the maritorium? Is it feasible to slow down what we perceive to enable other perceptions that we ignore?
The horizon is a necessary device to anchor us: it defines and determines our earthly world from imaginary one. It structures and orders us; it defines us as terrestrial. The horizon is an intangible and unattainable actor that contextualizes and dimensions us. It is an abstract entity that represents human perception as we can visualize in the works of Caspar D. Friedrich of the 19th century through his representations of sublime nature and its immense horizons that minimize and impose themselves on us.
During the navigation in the maritorium through the region of the Strait of Magellan and its fjords, and the Chilean Antarctic as part of the Radicante Navigable Residence, the perception of the horizon was redefined. I generated an electronic device made with mycelium with a compass and a gyroscope to collect the perceptible horizons inside the Maripaz II boat in which we carried out the crossing. It took the data of the movement of the ship because of the tides and it translated them into linear graphs that represent the horizons perceived by sailors in an extended period of time in order to be able to visualize them individualized but interconnected. The results were unique and unrepeatable and temporary “partitions”. They were generated jointly by the intertwined agencies of the environment: the action of the wind, the tides and the stars that produce them, the resistance exerted by the boat to these factors according to its weight and that of the people who were occuping it, the agency of the sensing device that deals with collecting these instances of interconnection, and the human ones, through the causal navigation decisions of the crew of the ship.
The lines are temporalities: of calm, violence and resistance. The horizon becomes an infinite ensemble of overlapping individualities, perceptible through the digital materiality that becomes a resource to disarm our perception. In the maritorium, the ways of inhabiting become different: our false centrality as a species vanishes and as living beings we become one more node of a living network that flows circularly between biotic and abiotic agents.
Everything is constituted as an interrelated metabolic complex where the confluence is the leitmotif and the interspecies meeting is the way of existing. We become "polyphonic ensembles", in the words of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, between humans and non-humans: symbiotic assemblages in a harmonic environment of overlapping worlds.
The sea makes shake our daily hegemony: It is not possible to inhabit it without embracing it: its waves, its tides, its violence from a human perspective, means that our bodies must adapt to its swing and coexist with it. Staticity is not possible in this fluid territory. Its movement modifies ours and we dissolve in its wateryness. Horizons become multiple, diverse and divergent.
