Project by Vasiliki Zochiou
This project traces the entanglement of scientific knowledge, extractivism, and geopolitics following the thread of the story of manganese nodules—metallic formations that grow over millions of years around sharks’ teeth on the deep-ocean seabed. Long archived as marginal objects at Columbia University’s Lamont Earth Observatory, the nodules have re-emerged as coveted resources for “clean” energy technologies, reframing the abyss as a new, unexplored mining frontier. Focusing on the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the Pacific Ocean, which is the main area of deep-sea mining interest, the project follows how ocean science, geo-political power, corporate interests, and international law shape visions of the seabed as empty, scalable, and exploitable. Seeking alternative cosmologies that the nodules carry, these techno-legal abstractions are blended with biological and cultural dimensions of the nodules. The speculative intervention of the “Shark Callers,” is a multispecies protest, drawing upon the relation of humans, sharks and nodules through space, time, matter and life, seeking for unexpected forms of solidarity, and asking how alternative ways of seeing and knowing might interrupt irreversible extractive futures.
