Artist: Sam Smith Work: Lithic Choreographies (2017) Partner: Baltic Art Centre Location: Gotland Island, Sweden
Sam Smith’s project, produced on the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, is a single-channel video that examines the distribution of geological material across time, with a focus on minerals circulated in cultural, economic, and environmental contexts.
By giving sentience to the island and a voice to its fight against slow deconstruction, the work provides the landmass with agency to make known the problematics of our current crisis, where the Earth’s system dynamics are absorbing the effects of human influence. In this role, Gotland urges us to think and feel on geological scales, to slow down and to receive messages transmitted by planetary media.
The artist travelled around the island of Gotland to meet with key people and specialists like Tom Mels, Associate Professor, Department of Social and Economic Geography Uppsala University, Dr. Gustaf Svedjemo, lecturer at the department of Archaeology and Ancient History Uppsala University and local fossile expert Sara Eliason at the Gotland Museum. One year Sam Smith returned to shoot a film at locations like Brucebo, Suderbys Ekoby, Uppsala University Campus Gotland, the archive of the Museum of Gotland and the Cementa lime stone quarry. The work resulted in the experimental documentary Lithic Choreographies, that mixes historical facts with speculative fiction to chronicle different chapters embedded to the island’s geological strata.
Scanning the landscape characterised by paleo-sea-stacks, fossil coastlines, concrete production plants and limestone quarries, the film focuses a lens on minerals circulated in economic, cultural and agricultural contexts. Working with locals to ground the film’s investigations within the myriad communities of Gotland, Sam Smith seeks to re-imagine our modes of engagement with and contributions to ecological assemblages.
“Through my time at Baltic Art Center, I gained a sense of Gotland as a living force: an active entity, but one that’s being deconstructed. Millions of years ago, sediments that circulated at the equator constructed the reef mass that became the island. Those raw materials are now being radically dispersed.” Sam Smith