Albedo, 2025

Shot in the icy water of the Arctic Ocean, the video installation Albedo flips our perspective on the imaginaries that have formed around the deep sea and deep space. The central motif of the video is the world of melting glaciers and icebergs, ontologically complex objects that hold strong socioeco­logical symbolism in our collective consciousness. Albedo inverts our view on this submerged realm, which, projected onto the ceiling of the museum, questions our sense of orientation and stability. Here the very notion of landscape is destabilized, rendered towering above a sea of sunken stars. In the video, these frozen mountains act as both subject and structure, their underbellies and melting borders becoming territories unto themselves, like celestial bodies cast adrift in a liquified cosmos.

Albedo acts as a diptych together with Julian Charrière’s 2019 video work Towards No Earthly Pole, which renders an uncanny and eerie blackened vision of the cryospheres at night.

Albedo furthers this project, reaching down into the Arctic Ocean and similarly contrasting the white vistas of dazzling snow and bright daylight. Doing so sheds new light on the trope of climate catastrophe, questioning our orientation and our ancestral patterns of looking and perceiving by casting our eyes both into the iridescent biomes of planetary waters, where many believe life first emerged, and upward, beyond our exosphere.

Foregrounding the importance of listening to both human and nonhuman languages, the score is composed using hydrophone record­ings. Structured around a chorus of marine vocalizations, it brings together the calls and echolocation clicks from orcas, sperm whales, bowhead whales, and humpback whales, forming a submerged lexicon of species unseen. A meditation on perception, disorientation, and planetary change, Albedo dissolves the boundaries between sea and space, ascent and descent, the known and the unknowable.


Credits
Editor: Johannes Förster
Score: Jana Irmert
Spatial Sound Designer: Felix Deufel
Post Production: Studio Johannes Förster
Editing Assistant: Leoni Faschian
Compositing Artists: Sean Sams, Neil Reynolds,
Tom Freeman, Felix Geen
Colorist: Nadia Khairat Gómez
Post-Production Assistance: Hannah Weidner, Valentina Gimenez
Technical Supervisor: Finn Jäger

Expedition
Expedition Coordinator: Morten Rasch
Field Recording Artist: Felix Deufel
Camera, ROV Operator & Director of Photography (DoP):
Antoine Drancey
Lighting, ROV Operator & Freediver: Runar Jarle Stray Wiik
Underwater Lighting Development & Technical Supervision:
Christophe Leclercq
Production Assistant: Mikael Rasch
Underwater Field Recordings and Advice: Benjamin Erwin;
William D. Halliday (Wildlife Conservation Society Canada);
John Hildebrandt, Joshua Jones (Scripps Institution of
Oceanography); Brian Miller (Australian Antarctic Program);
Ilse van Opzeeland (Alfred Wegener Institut)
Underwater Video Footage and Advice: Caitlin Bailey; Kim Bernard
(Oregon State University); Steve Haddock; Sönke Johnsen
(Duke University); Lonny Lundsten; Aaron Micallef;
Brennan T. Phillips (University of Rhode Island); John Ryan
(Monterey Bay Aquarium); Alexander Semonov (Moscow State
University); Natasha Van Zandt; Edith A. Widder; Sebastian Zeck

Acknowledgments
The artist would also like to thank Haley Ha, Allison Miller, Logan
Mock, Hannah Nolan, Carlie Wiener (Schmidt Ocean Institute)
and The Shifting Foundation.