Albedo

4K color film, 16:09 aspect ratio
4-5-1 ambisonics soundscape
43 minutes, continuous video loop

Shot in the icy water of the Arctic Ocean, 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 socio ecological symbolism in our collective consciousness. Albedo inverts our view on this submerged realm, which, projected onto the ceiling, 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 reaches down into the Arctic Ocean, contrasting the white vistas of dazzling snow and bright daylight. In doing so, it sheds 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, to where nonhuman forms may await.

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.

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

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

All images are © Julian Charrière / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn