Life at the Edges of Shifting Rhythms

<p><em>Undead Matter</em> is an unfolding conversation about where life lies in the ever-turning matter of our universe, as it rhythmically resurfaces over millennia. In this episode, artist and filmmaker, Shezad Dawood speaks with social and geopolitical anthropologist Mark Nuttall, who’s work is embedded in circumpolar rural communities, tracing the entanglements between climate change, extractive industries and identity of place. They discuss the accumulated residues, ecological cosmologies and shifting futures that have emerged from the deepest corners of the oceans, the icy subsurface and geological entanglements of Greenland’s complex landscapes and the lives they hold.</p> <p>Creation myths, told by Greenlandic storyteller Maria Kreutzmann, bubble up from the dark depths of the ocean and rub up against dramatic changes in the landscape throughout the past century. Dawood and Nuttall consider the differing life rhythms held in these lands; from the Greenlandic Shark, thought to live up to 500 years, to the rapid agricultural developments seen as warming temperatures creates abundant, fertile pastures.</p> <p>Past sci-fi imaginaries of novel, icy frontiers reveal their contemporary reality as the abandoned subterranean Cold War military base of Camp Century surface through the thawing ice. Against a backdrop of modernisation and new extractive industries, they consider the differing perspectives of autonomy and sustainability in a rapidly shifting landscape, which is still imbued with ancient knowledges of kinship within these fragile ecologies, where life-that-thrives takes on different meanings and temporalities.</p>