What Emerges in Submersion? ❘ Experiences, Practices, and Politics from Below
Film, Lesung und Gespräch mit
Marie Sophie Beckmann| Petra Löffler | Amelie Wedel
Whether conceived as ocean, ground, soil, a metaphorical underworld, or a political figure of thought, the subsurface has become a key site in contemporary debates on ecological, social, and postcolonial conflicts and power asymmetries across the humanities and beyond. To engage the subterranean, however, is never merely thematic. It entails a conceptual and methodological movement – a practice of submersion that demands critical reflection on the conditions, technologies, aesthetics, and politics of knowledge production.
In The Extractive Zone (2017), Macarena Gómez-Barris introduced the notion of “submerged modes” to describe complex and resistant forms of life and knowledge. These social ecologies are embedded in specific material and media environments – shaped by industrial and digital-capitalist, neocolonial exploitation, dispossession, and surveillance – while simultaneously resisting them. Marked by intangible density and illegible heterogeneity, such perspectives evade an “extractive view” from above: modes of seeing that seek totalizing representation, scientific disciplining, and capitalist valorization. Instead, they call for methods and perspectives that are themselves submerged – a perception from below.
Building on Gómez-Barris’s concept and slightly shifting its terminology, Marie Sophie Beckmann, Petra Löffler, and Amelie Wedel explore the critical potential of sub(e)merging in dialogue with contemporary film and artworks. What challenges does sub(e)merging pose to dominant modes of representation? How might going beneath the surface become a position from which to perceive, speak, and act differently? And in what ways does sub(e)merging destabilize the ground itself as a site of evidence and knowledge production?
Über uns
Whether conceived as ocean, ground, soil, a metaphorical underworld, or a political figure of thought, the subsurface has become a key site in contemporary debates on ecological, social, and postcolonial conflicts and power asymmetries across the humanities and beyond. To engage the subterranean, however, is never merely thematic. It entails a conceptual and methodological movement – a practice of submersion that demands critical reflection on the conditions, technologies, aesthetics, and politics of knowledge production.
In The Extractive Zone (2017), Macarena Gómez-Barris introduced the notion of “submerged modes” to describe complex and resistant forms of life and knowledge. These social ecologies are embedded in specific material and media environments – shaped by industrial and digital-capitalist, neocolonial exploitation, dispossession, and surveillance – while simultaneously resisting them. Marked by intangible density and illegible heterogeneity, such perspectives evade an “extractive view” from above: modes of seeing that seek totalizing representation, scientific disciplining, and capitalist valorization. Instead, they call for methods and perspectives that are themselves submerged – a perception from below.
Building on Gómez-Barris’s concept and slightly shifting its terminology, Marie Sophie Beckmann, Petra Löffler, and Amelie Wedel explore the critical potential of sub(e)merging in dialogue with contemporary film and artworks. What challenges does sub(e)merging pose to dominant modes of representation? How might going beneath the surface become a position from which to perceive, speak, and act differently? And in what ways does sub(e)merging destabilize the ground itself as a site of evidence and knowledge production?
