DEEP SEA DINNER
by Bastian Haukefær, Kataria Kierulf, Maria Thoner & Sara Boukili
Today, in the ongoing present, a new future for humanity is being drafted and discussed. A new financial odyssey is potentially dwelling within the crust of what we refer to as our seabed. The International Seabed Association, with offices in Kingston, Jamaica, is working for a multinational agreement enabling all countries (with the technology, finance, and knowledge to explore and exploit) to participate. It is a proposal that potentially offers the rest of the unknown wilderness on planet Earth for our “benefit.” At the same time, Norway, one of the few countries with the above ”expertise”, has found minerals, potentially worth a fortune, within our defined economic zone. It has been discussed as our new oil, the next chapter of our financial odyssey. Now, a decade later, we look back at the table that cut out the new cake, trying to figure out: how will the future find us, and at what cost, what are we defining our collective future as? What will the memory be of the origin of life? When has the origin itself become a material for a commodity? We might speculate, we might be utopian or dystopian, but we do not know. Are we in a democracy, or what does that really mean now? On the 9th October, 2021, a conference, with a dinner, for the selected few, was held in honour of this new future.
Some claim we are already living in nostalgia, not for the past, but for the present in a distant future, where we are able to look back, upon a time, where humanity tried to save herself from nature, and by that, turning democracy into the vehicle for the unknown machine, and not anymore, for the ones breathing and sharing it. For the sake of conversation, questions from the future were sent back, and to open a new discussion with the present, we invite you to the deep-sea dinner 2033. We will serve 5 courses and hopefully have a fruitful conversation during the dinner. The license for deep-sea mining is accepted, but is the discussion completed? We are here in the deep sea, sitting around the round table. The dinner is taking place where humans have never been. We are having a dinner in the deep sea, at high pressure, in between active volcanoes. We are breathing the smoky water and particles of mud, and microorganisms are floating around us. We are eating gold and tubeworms for dinner. For dessert, the cake from Loki’s castle will be served. The seafloor is filled with golf balls, as traces of human forces, from the drilling company that played golf from the deck in the 1990s. We find ourselves here, in this unknown, looking back upon the fragments, questions, and statements that let us travel to this space, and re-opening a dinner once held, in the lens of the future that found it. We hope that you, reading - listening, or finding this, will form your own position, in the ongoing present, based on the fact that we have already entered a future way beyond us, and contemplate on what your nostalgia will be when our time catches up with it?
