Meet Marina Zurkow, an introduction by Louis Bury at #TSpec5

Marina Zurkow’s 2014-16 conceptual project, ''Dear Climate'', contains visual, written, and sonic components. Created in collaboration with artists and academics Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl,
Oliver Kellhammer, and Sarah Rothberg, the work consists of 6 podcasts and nearly 70 posters about climate change.


The goal of the work is to help audiences reflect on their “inner climate” in the era of the Anthropocene; in the artists’ view, too much of the discourse around climate change focuses on crisis and catastrophe.


Consequently, the tone of Dear Climate’s component parts are intentionally playful, weird, and soothing, sometimes all at once.


For
example, a representative poster reads, “Climate Change?/ Will it Make Me Look Fat?”

Taking its cues from Zurkow’s playfully serious tone, Dr Bury's presentation at Tuning Speculation takes the form of a series of brief letters addressed to the climate.


Focusing on Dear Climate’s podcasts, which sound like scripts for guided meditation, my letters pursue a theory of the vibratory yogic mantra, Om. Each podcast begins and ends with a sonorous chime that, much like a yogic Om, sonically demarcates a period of altered or heightened attentiveness. In yoga, the practitioner’s movements and breathing are the mechanism through which consciousness gets altered; in the podcasts, it is the conjunction of defamiliarized sound and language.


Through such attentions, I argue that, like a paradox-besotted yoga instructor, Zurkow suggests that individuals can best effect positive ecological change by accepting their inability to do so.


-- Louis Bury