The Underground Division (Helen Pritchard, Femke Snelting, and Jara Rocha) contributes to BodyBuilding, an exhibition curated by Hackers & Designers @ Tetem, Enschede. Opening 20 February 2020.
ROCK REPO
The ROCK REPO is a device built by a team of trans*feminist post-normal scientists for thinking with rock. Managing rock slope instabilities by LiDAR, optimising strata modelling for fracking, rendering cavities in 3D for gaming, and algorithmically smoothed rock shaders are all deposited in the REPO. The REPO inquires into these banal, exquisite, kitsch, static, carbonivourous figurations to fracture the normative 3D processes of geocomputation and their crushing exploitations and extractions.
Through making a collection of ROCKS, The Underground Division gets close to particular ROCKS and their unstable stories, as told through scientific and technological practice. Recognising that rocks have their own lively forces, the unruly team studies rocks’ 3D imaginings, the softwares and hardwares that rocks intervene on and builds new glossaries on the go. Their studies operate as a chipping away at what limits the resistant and destructive capacities of rocks.The ROCK REPO device crosscuts with rocks as ‘bodies’ in a purposeful move away from the somatic corporealities of individual humans. This shift allows the team to ask about inhuman materialities and how they matter [in] the world.
The REPO is an inquiry into what ROCK is, what it could be and the ways in which ROCK is seen or considered as an entity separate from its environment. It works with the ‘deep implicancies’* of this moving between figure and ground, asking what happens as result of this cut, and what other formations could appear. Sharpened by queer and anticolonial sensibilities, investigates the way ROCKS are quarried, measured, quantified, historicized, visualized, predicted, classified, modelled. The REPO as an instrument itself crystallizes other stories of spatial and temporal geologic processes and throws rocks through the glaciated windows of turbocapitalism.
* A term Denise Fereira Da Silva and Arjuna Neuman borrow from forensic genetics to talk about implications and entanglement in a non-linear way.
Also contributing: Kiki Mager and Nazanin Karimi. In collaboration with architect and designer Thomas Rustemeyer, H&D has developed an interactive exhibition structure which will host the works and invite you to actively participate in the (de) constructing the works.