GMU:Life in an aquatic ecosystem/Cosmo Schüppel

GHOSTS FINDING GHOSTS

A strange sensation has begun to settle in my chest, a constant tug at my memory, but also a push toward something undefined. Perhaps it’s the memory of a moment just past. Perhaps it’s the fact that there are more than one, more than one layer, one whisper, one echo — still here but distant, felt but not understood. In all cultures ghosts haunt places, humans, whole societies. We can talk of ghosts as shadows cast from times lost, places forgotten. But what if it’s not the ghost that haunts us, but rather, we who haunt ourselves? The ghosts we encounter are never the past itself. Instead, they are–in their most concrete form traces and effects– and in their most abstract, what we imagine the past to be, what it means to us now, what we need it to be. In any case, it is the space between past and present, presence and absence where ghosts become almost. In all cultures ghosts haunt places, humans, whole societies. They lean over from the in-between to haunt the human realm. Rarely we find stories of ghosts haunting each other in their natural habitats. But for humans it seems different. It is our own past that seems to haunt us, our own actions, mistakes, traumata and hopes.

The project Ghosts Finding Ghosts explores the omnipresence of anthropocentric ghosts - through the lens of the wildfires in Nea Penteli (Athens) summer 2024 - in a book and a participatory performance.

Through essays, exercises and interviews asks Ghosts Finding Ghosts: Which ghosts haunt a burned landscape? Where do ghosts come from and where do they disappear to? What is the human role in creating ghosts? How can ghosts be experienced? Where are the borders of human sensing? And what is absence? What are traces?

How alive is the dead?

What colours live in the Grey?

Ghosts are almost like Memories - They disappear when I try to hold on.

Eat un-nutritious food.

Stare at a digital landscape.

Stuff yourself with Expectations.

Find hope in simple Ideologies.

We are imprisoned and shielded by Ghosts.

Is this, what being haunted feels like?

STATE OF WRITING

Essay: I am the Ghosts that Haunt Themselves

This essay explores the notion that haunting emerges as a confrontation with ourselves, where ghosts are not the past but traces shaped by our memories, traumas, and needs. They dwell in the in-between, blurring the line between presence and absence, reflecting how humans are haunted by their own actions and histories.

File:I am ghosts that haunt themselves.pdf

Essay: Haunted by Systems, Haunted by Loss:

Memories, ghosts, and systems intertwine to shape our haunted existence, blurring the lines between past, present, and imagined futures. As the Anthropocene disrupts natural and cultural rhythms, haunting becomes a way to understand our disconnection—where nature, systems, and memory act as almost-living agents, challenging human orientation in a fractured world.

File:Haunted by Systems, Haunted by Loss.pdf

Exercises I-V (first draft):

File:I am ghosts that haunt themselves-2.pdf

STATE OF DESIGN

PDF: Tests for DesignFile:241216finding ghosts tests.pdf

Cover: The text (Ghosts Finding Ghosts...) will be printed on a separate, translucent paper - functioning as a cover for the book.

Sample: Text page (Essay/Interview)

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Sample: Text page (Exercise)

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Inspiration

<Fantasma - Jannete Mark

<Editor: Unknown

New Document: Typical Organisation for Standards and Order >

Performance Score:

The Ghosts Finding Ghost - Performance is a participatory adaptation of the Performance Speeding the ashes of the 2021 Evia Wildfires, performed at Ars Electronica Campus Exhibition sense & sense-abilities.

In the performance Speeding the ashes of the 2021 Evia Wildfires, the performer spreads wildfire ashes for 2,5 h. Moving around a circular void, the performer spreads and smears ashes - taken out of a small black box - over and over again. The traces of his finger imprints gradually transform the shapes created on the floor. There is no contact with the audience. There is no interruption. There is no narration. After the time has run out, the performer takes a rag and cleans the ashes from the flor - storing them in his small black box. He leaves the space and their is only the faded remain of a layer of ash on the floor.

VIDEO-MATERIAL

SCREENSHOTS OF : Wasteland of post-wildfire NEA PENTELI, Athens

In a broader scope the project should develop to an experimental documentary film. In it, the site is used as an anchor point to collect perspectives on ghosts and the destruction organic habitats. Scientists, Philosophers, Ghost Hunters, Farmers, Firemen, Poets and others explore the site through their own means of research and explain their perspective on this. This creates a divers, poetic image of a haunted place - moving between reality and fiction and science and art.

The footage will be edited to a larger scale 3 channel, narrative, video Installation.

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EXPERIMENTS

The following experiments are conducted to explore the sleeping life in the ashes of the Nea Penteli Wildfires. They are to be seem rather symbolic than scientific, as the ashes were probably contaminated on their travel to Weimar. Nonetheless, the image of colours growing from grey; life rising from the dead ash -- is a powerful one.

Experiment ONE: Fishing for Ghosts

This fist experiment throws out hooks into the different kingdoms of organisms, to test what lives inside the ashes of the 2024 Athens Wildfires.

MALT EXTRACT MEDIUM

Plating: 9.11.2024

Fotos (front + back): 14.Nov.2024

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ISOLATION OF SINGULAR BEINGS: 14.Nov.2024

Plating: 14.Nov.2024

Foto: 18.Nov.2024

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LB-MEDIUM

Plating (Foto ONE) :14.Nov.2024

Foto TWO: 18.Nov.2024

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References

Books

Jacques Derrida: Specters of Marx

- The foundational text introducing “hauntology” as a concept. Derrida explores the persistence of Marxist ideals as ghosts haunting late capitalism.

Sofie Benoot: Solid Ground

- PhD paper on Essay Film in the ecological crisis

Mark Fisher: Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

- Fisher applies hauntology to culture, focusing on how contemporary art, music, and media are haunted by the unrealized futures of modernism.

Timothy Morton: Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence

- While not directly about hauntology, Morton’s ideas on “dark ecology” resonate with the spectrality of environmental collapse and the lingering effects of human actions.

Anna Tsing: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

- Explores the ghostly traces of capitalism in ecological systems and the potential for new forms of life to emerge from its ruins.

Avery F. Gordon: Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

- A sociological perspective on haunting, exploring how ghosts embody unresolved social and historical tensions.

Graham Harman: Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy

- Examines hauntology within speculative realism, focusing on the eerie and the strange as forms of ghostly persistence.

Achille Mbembe: Necropolitics

- Analyzes spectrality in political theory, focusing on how death and haunting shape power structures.

Caroline Levine: Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network

- Explores how literary and cultural forms resonate across time, embodying a hauntological persistence of structures.

Films

Sofie Benoot: Apple Cider Vineger  (2024)

- When a retired nature documentary narrator passes a kidney stone, she decides to tell one more story about this forgotten world of stone

Peter Meddler: While The Green Grass Grows (2023)

- Peter Meddler follows the flow of rivers, looking at the miracles contained in everyday things and occurrences. He ponders the passing of his own parents and the questions that arise.

Chris Marker: Sans Soleil (1983)

- "He wrote me...." A woman narrates the thoughts of a world traveler, meditations on time and memory expressed in words and images from places as far-flung as Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, and San Francisco.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel: Leviathan (2012)

- Leviathan is an experimental documentary capturing the chaotic and visceral experience of life aboard a commercial fishing vessel through raw, immersive footage.

Theo Montoya: Anhell69 (2022)

The poetic documentary explores youth, queerness, and death in Medellín, reflecting on a lost generation through the lens of an unmade ghost movie.

Dimitris Kourtis, Stratis Vogiatzis: Ekeini ti mera (2021)

The documentary That Day showcases how the 2021 catastrophic wildfires in Northern Evia interweave with the rejuvenation of the land, and its collective memory with the creation of a music theatre performance that resulted from the Greek National Opera's artistic workshops with members of the local community.