Knudeklint is a cliff formation at the island Fur, located in the big fjord Limfjorden in the Northern part of Denmark. The area is a geologically unique place that aspires to become a UNESCO World Heritage site. Its uniqueness is related to the special seabed, and the cliff and earth formation (The Fur Formation), built out of multicoloured single-celled aquatic algae, diatoms, that fossilized fiftyfive million years ago, when a subtropical sea covered the area. There are also hundreds of layers of ashes in both the seabed and the cliffs, stemming from the significant volcanic activity that was taking place in the area at the same time. The up to 40-50 metre high cliffs were shaped during the Ice Age 10,000 years ago, when the ice pushed the rocklike, although very light, diatomaceous earth sediments upwards.
My lifepartner’s ashes are scattered outside the cliffs. Visiting her and the spot once a year, I have become deeply attracted to the cliffs and the waters, which still today abound with living diatoms. I take lessons about the life/death thresholds from the diatoms. They help me to a spiritual-material understanding of life and death as a vibrant continuum rather than as something that happens along a straight line with an endpoint. I reflect in-depth on this in my forthcoming philosophic-poetic book Vibrant Death. A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning (Bloomsbury, London 2022).
Útesita
©Nina LykkeFullMoonEveningContemplationsIMG_1500.mov
This weather calls for contemplation of the darker sides of ...
Softness, softness, softness, softness, softness.
Dark skies to one side, and sooo light to the other side.
What does it mean?
Two fossil hunters just passed with their axes, the axes with which they destroy the diatom cliffs, destroy them to seek fossils, fossils that should not be disturbed in their fossilized graves.
But these fossil hunters, they hack, hack, hack, hack, hack, hack.
This afternoon we went to see the extractivism at the other side of the island. I thought that this practice had been abandoned earlier.
But there are still two factories producing insulation bricks and cat litter from the mo-clay.
Destroying the earth, destroying the cliffs, making big, big, big holes in the cliffs, big craters in the cliffs.
So sad. So sad.
How do we get to a planetary ethics? How do we get to an ontology of softness*)? To an ontology of vibrant death **), so that every critter’s death is vibrant? So that every critter’s death is vibrant in the sense that the critter returns and can return cyclically. This is made possible through vibrant death.
But through the extractivist death, return is not possible. This is necropolitics. The necropolitics of extractivism. Happening everywhere. Happening also on this island.
It is sad. It is very sad.
Now the heaven is getting darker and darker. Darker and darker.
Yesterday, there was a very beautiful sunset, but it is today that the fullmoon is peaking. So therefore, this is the chosen day. What does the planet, the sky, the earth, the cliffs, the waves, the seagulls want to tell? Saying: ”Just get off you bloody destructive creatures. Get off my fleshy beautiful earthbody. Get off, get off, get off, if you will continue this way.
If you want to stay, then attune to a planetary ethics and an ontology of softness.
Otherwise, ”Get off!!”
Thanks to curator, artist and scholar Camila Marambio for acting as spirit helper in the Fullmoon night ritual, and for co-creating these contemplations.
*) Cf. Camila Marambio and Nina Lykke, Sandcastles. Cancerous Bodies: Talents and Necropowers, manuscript in preparation.
**) Cf. Nina Lykke: Vibrant Death. A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning. London: Bloomsbury Academic (forthcoming 2022)