Marine Snow, a one-hour video installation, immerses viewers in footage from twenty day and night dives in the Atlantic conducted aboard the research vessel Celtic Explorer on its journey from Cádiz to Cork. The artist mounted her custom camera rig onto a CTD instrument, which measures conductivity, temperature, and the vertical profile of the water. At 80 meters below the surface, particles of marine snow drift through the dark waters, accompanied by tiny and larger lifeforms, revealing a hidden vitality and a secret choreography of the ocean that is usually invisible to the human eye.
Text by Frank Fehrenbach:
Simone Kessler's Marine Snow is a meditation on life, time, and the perception of non-human nature that does not require words. Rather, the desire to name things and the possibility of saying anything meaningful is lost in the course of contemplation. We look and marvel and surrender to a movement that undulates and sways without direction, revealing a sea in which the living and the non-living cannot be separated; both appear as light. Everything moves, is moved, seeks and finds connection, flows by, alone, in community. Associations drift past like the fragile beings of this blue world: Primordial water. The unlimited. Procreative nature. The flowing medium itself is the form-giving matrix. – – –
Then even the associations fall silent. Marine Snow has the power to draw us into a swell without shores, without destination, beginning, or end; into a planetary life in whose currents we find ourselves. There, of which we grasp only fragments, as in Simone Kessler's two-hour video, which itself has no boundaries, interrupted by only a few cuts. Like the striving, wandering, ever-new, ever-returning sea creatures, viewers also decide whether to stay or move on, to be carried away in both their own and a shared matrix. They will miss an infinity of experience the moment they leave. But they will also see an infinity of wonders in every moment they stay.
Our gaze is sometimes focused, sometimes dissolved into the whole. There is a rising and falling, hypnotic and comforting. At least five movements interweave: the waves of an invisible sea surface high above the camera; shifting layers; the movement of the fauna; the constant sinking of the “marine snow”; and our gaze: sometimes quickly drawn in, sometimes at rest. The sounds: crackling, rattling, striking, metallic – a reminder that we are strangers down here, as is the camera. At the end, a large jellyfish slowly passes by as if in greeting, and the sounds gradually fade away. We will come back.
Photos by Fred Dott for Neue Kunst in Hamburg