Pure Life
3d animation, sound, windows XP aquarium screensaver, IBM ThinkPad, helping third hand magnifier, rock salt, microscope, algae, salt water, electric wire cable, SAD lamp, rock, artificial grass. 2020

In Staying with the Trouble Donna Haraway proposes that, for all of the failings of the Anthropocene, the figure of the Anthropos is not responsible for the processes that threatens mass extinction. Rather, she suggests, if we were to use only one word for these  processes, it should be the Capitalocene. Nevertheless, mass extinction is not a sudden event or even a new one. Mass extinctions carried out by the very first conquistadors in the so called “Age of Discovery” were continental — mass extinctions of indigenous peoples, animals, plants and micro organisms.

Haraway argues that a third term is needed: Chthulucene, a word derived from chthon, meaning “earth” in Greek and which is associated with things that dwell in or under the earth. The Chthulucene, for Haraway, refers to processes of reworlding. Haraway has described the concept of Nature “as that which we cannot not desire. Excruciatingly conscious of nature's discursive constitution as "other" in the histories of colonialism, racism, sexism, and class domination of many kinds, we nonetheless find in this problematic, ethno-specific, long-lived, and mobile concept something we cannot do without, but can never “have". We must find another relationship to nature besides reification and possession.” In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon wrote: “For a colonised people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity”. The colonial violence since the beginning was clear on that it is not exclusively on the native indigenous people, but on the whole native ecosystem.

Ancient Indigenous bacteria was found 250 meters below seafloor at the centre of the Dead Sea, one of the most extreme ecosystems on earth. Pure Life investigates how new forms of life could arise in such environments, how first life-forms generated. On the other hand rethinking a colonised ecosystem in a body - the denaturalised landscape of the Dead Sea and the Jordan Valley - overtaken by plastic objects and e-waste, to name a few, is a result of colonial contamination and strategy.

Pure Life is an exercise in recomposing life/non-life forms, taking the Dead Sea as a cornerstone for imagining new forms of “life” after the Anthropocene/Capitalocene, examining the interaction between indigenous bacteria and colonial contamination in a digital ecosystem.