Matter in the Field

Field Forum is a series curated by curated by Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan that centres the interconnectedness embedded in the built environment, attuning our senses to material flows, planetary scales, intergenerational times and all the life entangled in these processes.

This evening is centred around the ice-core media and seabed sense with artist researcher Susan Schuppli and anthropologist Lukas Ley. There will be Ice Records on the turntable, film screenings, a short talk from each guest, and a conversation chaired by Cyan and Chen.

A short film Gondwana (2022) will be on loop from 6.10pm, and the talk and conversation will start from 6.30pm. It will be a floor-based gathering with rugs, cushions and mats and seating for those who prefer it. You are welcome to come from 6.10pm to enjoy the short film with drinks ahead of the conversation.

ICE-CORE MEDIA
Susan Schuppli

"Ice cores are like a time machine, revealing layers of old ice like pages in a history book."

"Ice cores are like a tape recorder of climatic history and that history is disappearing worldwide."

Ice cores have consistently been analogised as technical forms of storage media, from the inscriptive process of writing books and the registration of sound by tape recorders to their operative function as libraries, archives, and repositories of big data. These slender vertical columns that scientists extract from the planet’s ice reserves as they tunnel deep back in time toward bedrock carry vast amounts of environmental information about Earth’s climate systems. Importantly, they provide us with direct access to the temperature records and chemical composition of our early atmosphere because tiny bubbles of air sampled almost one million years ago are trapped inside their compressed layers of snowfall – annual accumulations that have transformed the planet’s ice sheets into the high-resolution dataset for climate reconstructions and modelling. Ice-core media thus enable scientists to “read” the planet’s climate history in the sedimented pages of its Earth writing. It also allows them to “tune” into the emanations of early Earth via the rewind and playback functions of geo-chemistry that can release the atmospheric acoustics locked in ice. Yet ultimately, ice is much more than a simple storage medium. Like rock, like bone … ice is a material witness.

Gondwana (2022), Realised by Susan Schuppli with original music by Mhamad Safa. HD video, colour with stereo sound, 2022, 29:14 mins.

Over a period of two decades the India News Review produced many documentaries about the role of Indian science in Antarctica including the arrival of the first Indian female scientist Sudipta Sengupta in 1982. Gondwana recuts more than 10 archival films to tell the story of the deep geological and geopolitical connections between the Himalayas, Antarctica, and Mars.

SEABED SENSE
Lukas Ley

Coastal sediments do not easily capture the human imagination. They are strange to the human body and mind, as they exist in the opaque and unruly medium of seawater. What if we considered sediments differently? What if we saw sediments as things that enact environmental futures, some of which are less desirable? To instigate a new understanding of sediments requires looking, in practical and conceptual terms, underneath the sea to address the relationality and historicity of chalk, silt, and sand patches. Mapping and monitoring the ocean floor, as my interlocutors involved in dredging do, is a way of knowing sediments. How else can we foster a ‘seabed sensibility,’ one that links the existence of sediments to histories of urban development and stays open to a radical unburying of forgotten and possible natures?

A short film Under Pressure (2024) by Aurélie Darbouret will be screened as part of Lukas’ contribution.

Susan Schuppli is a researcher and practitioner based in the UK whose work examines material evidence from war and conflict to environmental disasters and climate change. Her recent documentary films focus primarily on climate change within the cryosphere and involve work with Earth scientists, grass roots organizations, and affected communities. Creative projects have been exhibited throughout Europe, Asia, Canada, and the US. She has published widely within the context of media and politics and is author of the book, Material Witness published by MIT Press in 2020. Schuppli is Professor and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London where she is also an affiliate artist-researcher and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture. Previously she was Senior Research Fellow and Project Co-ordinator of the human rights agency Forensic Architecture.

Lukas Ley is an environmental and urban anthropologist working at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, where he leads a DFG-funded Emmy Noether research group on the infrastructural lives of sand. His research is broadly concerned with urban marginalization, temporality, and material environments. Current research projects investigate the role of sand in protecting coastal commons and driving dispossession in Denpasar, Indonesia, and the afterlives of concrete in Marseille, France. Ley's first book, “Building on Borrowed Time: Rising Seas and Failing Infrastructure in Semarang” published by University of Minnesota Press in 2021, was awarded the Social Science Prize by European Association for Southeast Asian Studies and received an Honorable Mention for the Harry J. Benda Prize of the Association for Asian Studies.

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng is Harvard GSD’s Wheelwright Prize Fellow for TRACING SAND and a CCA-Mellon multidisciplinary researcher on field-based research.
Chen Zhan is an architect, anthropologist and independent filmmaker as well as a CCA-Mellon multidisciplinary researcher on field-based research. .

Image: Chen Zhan, “Eroded Mekong Sandy Island,” 2024, Laos-Thailand Border.

Please get in touch to let us know of any access requirements that you might have and how we can best accommodate these. If you are unable to attend physically but would like to participate in the event remotely please email

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Architectural Association, 36 Bedford Square, London, United Kingdom