By Giulia Champion
Water03: underwater stories for more-than-human futures. I was in session 2 on afternoon of Monday 19th. My craft work represents how legal, technological and scientific work looks and envisions the deep ocean (it is territorialised and separate in ways that do not make sense underwater) and seabed mining is polymetallic nodules in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which has been carved for companies and countries to explore while the regulatory framework is being developed. Hence the suit pocket representing the autonomous rover hoover up the nodules: suits make the decisions (corporations and countries). The nodules are seen as necessary for energy transitions and companies often talk about them like golden nuggets and make them look like they have gold inside. So while they don’t have any, I have put some yellow and gold to refer to that. Also, many visualisations of deep sea mining make it look like it’s happening in an empty space to be extracted, a classic colonial narrative, but we need to approach these questions through multi-species ethics to put back the more than human underwater.