Sunken Forests / Carbon Rifts

Composite map elaborated using the 2010 Lloyd’s Shipwreck Registry. Each red dot corresponds to an insured shipwreck

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Sunken Forest / Carbon Rifts is an installation exploring contemporary forms of salvage accumulation in public policies addressing climate change through emissions trading. It aims to constitute an archive of the slow violence embedded in the wrecks of ships, barges and other sea-worth vessels by collating reclaimed wooden shipwrecks of the Thames estuary with carbon mensuration and valuation. The interface (a fork of YoHa's automaton editor) randomly loads clips from a large database documenting the process of unearthing, floating and gathering wreck wood. The weight of the carbon is coupled with live carbon futures price (found at carbonderivation.space) to produce the market value of the wreck wood.

Maritime archaeologists and geologists remind us that there has always been more vessels wasted on the ocean floor than circumnavigating its surface. In Principles of Geology (1832) Charles Lyell included an examination of the Lloyd’s list of wrecks in England from 1793 to 1829 to show the material extent being deposited on the seabed of the Thames Estuary and North Seas. An approximate computation of sank vessels—lost to warfare, storms, shoals, or mutiny—gave 550 crafts per year, or an average of 1.5 per day. Building an eighty-guns ship required two thousands tons of wood; so with each sunk vessel went 40 acres of oak forest; each mature tree harvested after 150 years. Only 60 top rate ships—of less than a 120 guns—would be enough to consume a forest like Epping in Essex (UK). Today, the 2010 Lloyd’s register included a mere 100.000 shipwrecks, only those worth of contracting insurance. Each red dot in the composite map—elaborated after Lloyd’s Shipwreck Registry—corresponds to an insured shipwreck. The sunken forests of England have always been vaster and denser than those standing inland. The foreshore is, in fact, a forest-on-the-shore.

Carbon Rifts was commissioned with the generous support of the London Community Foundation and Cockayne - Grants for the Art, for the Complex Value$ exhibition at the Somerset House Studios. Photography: Tim Bowditch.

Further info: Carbon Rifts

Exhibited at the Somerset House [London, UK], Art Meets Radical Openness (AMRO) [Linz, AT], The Exchange [Erith, UK].

Live carbon futures price programmed by Alessia Milo.