Thomas Kneubühler

Patrick Brain Smith on the video «Forward Looking Statements»
Article in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism Vol. 47, No 4, 2020 (excerpt)

Colonizing Futures: Thomas Kneubühler’s Forward Looking Statements
Throughout «Forward Looking Statements», Kneubühler’s GoPro camera—mounted on top of his guide Charlie Angutinguak’s ATV—moves across a section of the Aupaluk landscape, where another potential mining site might be opened. Unstable and juddering over the uneven terrain, the camera seems to render the materiality of the landscape. As previously mentioned, the audio accompanying this work comes from an Oceanic Iron Ore Corporation conference call describing the possibility for future extraction from this site. The Oceanic Iron Ore Corporation is a Vancouver-based resource extraction multinational, particularly focused on the Ungava Bay area of Northern Quebec. Approximately halfway through the call, we hear from the company’s Chief Operating Officer, Alan Gorman: “The prefeasibility study delivers positive economic results. We have assumed a price for iron of $100. All amounts have been recorded in US dollars with a one-to-one exchange rate and the base case, pre-tax net present value of $5.6 billion.” As Gorman continues to speak, the camera snakes along the side of a rocky outcrop, seemingly searching for an appropriate place to scale this incline. How then does Kneubühler’s visual-aural juxtaposition seek to map the interconnections between the abstract extractive future speculation of the Oceanic Iron Ore Corporation and the materiality of the sites they wish to exploit?

Kneubühler’s stratigraphic approach—through its presentation of the local, textural, and material sites of extractive capital’s future exploitation—inserts points of rupture into a system that is typically read as abstracted and speculative. It is precisely here, within these sites of tension, that we can begin to tease open the fissures, cracks, and contradictions embedded within the operative logics of the extractive industries. For Toscano, “there is much to learn from those critical artistic practices which at one and the same time seek to ‘see it whole’ and to explore the numerous ways in which such sight is imposed or occluded, modulated and mutable.” Within Kneubühler’s work, we find such an intersectional approach: attempting to map a global system of speculation and future projection while also remaining attentive to the myriad of local material realities on the ground. Through the oscillatory strategies adopted by Kneubühler—which shuttle between the macro and micro, future and present—he examines how these extractive and speculative forms of violence have disastrous impacts on the local, microphysical level. By examining the landscapes of potential exploitation, Kneubühler does not allow these forms of speculation to fully colonize Indigenous futures. Rather, «Forward Looking Statements» regrounds such abstracted and speculative forms of violence, returning them to—and enmeshing them within—the sites and spaces of possible exploitation. Future forms of violence are thus powerfully juxtaposed with the present state of the Indigenous landscapes that are under threat, and, as a result, these future forms of colonization and extraction are unable to assume full control over the present state of this Indigenous space.