The project invites its viewer to navigate through Sonia Levy’s film For the Love of Corals. In her film, Levy accompanies the complex process of breeding the highly endangered corals which is undertaken by the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London. This effort requires a practice of care and an awareness of our manifold entanglement with all the living.

Entangled with it are polyphonic writings that take as their starting point Derek Walcott’s famous poem “The Sea Is History” (1979) to weave together Levy’s research at the Horniman Museum and Gardens with ruminations by the philosopher Martin Savransky on the precarious lives of corals in the ecological hold of a perhaps, of the faint possibility of inhabiting the Earth otherwise.

The Great Barrier Reef off Cairns, Australia, has seen one of its warmest summers in 2020, and with it, yet another mass coral bleaching event. Some of the features of the polyphonic composition are connected to and respond to live water-temperature data from Cairns.

Accompanying the film, such polyphonies provide continuities and resonances to its visual inquiries. How to inherit the precariousness of our earthly present? How to sustain endangered worlds and stories? How to tell stories in uncertain times? How to attend to the interstices where lives and worlds are made during and despite ongoing devastation, bleaching, and extinction?

© Sonia Levy
In collaboration with the ZKM | Karlsruhe, and Martin Savransky (text) Produced with the support of Obsidian Coast and Fluxus Art Projects
Soundtrack and located sound: Jez Riley French
Music: Georgia Rodgers

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/28546