Anna Karoline Mueller
Returning a Fossil to the Ground

What started as an interest in critical ecology, the environmental humanities, and discourse analysis of political / cultural narratives surrounding the Anthropocene has become much more sticky and personal when it accumulated in an experimental artistic research practice.

As I started to take field trips, documenting a Fracking Site in Brockham, Surrey in 2020 I soon became aware of the complex entanglement of my own body and habitus, my desires and nostalgias with the fossil fuels I researched.

This somewhat unnerving notion, the collapse of the separation between the industrial and the intimate, together with a frustration about the lack of available methods to enter the subsurface, both physically and discursive have accumulated in a practice which seeks to work through this mesh of the contemporary moment and its materiality.

Using a method on the thresholds of fiction, interpretation of geological data, lockdown-journaling, and experimental photography, my practice seeks to open a space of exploring what it feels like to live in late capitalism, at the end of the world (as we know it) while simultaneously never defining this space itself fully. This exploration is informed by critical works of Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Donna Haraway, Rob Nixon and Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands amongst others.

Working at the intersection of practiced fine art and critical theory, my research seeks to make use of the unique potential of two different modes and epistemologies informing each other and lending each other a critical eye without seeking to resolve the other.

The contemporary conjunction of the climate crisis and the continuous investment in fossil fuels and petro-capitalism requires new tools in order to shift towards planetary healing and reconciliation. I argue that such tools do not necessarily need to be technological ones, but rather and initially, new ontologies which can be imagined through aesthetic and poetic interruptions.