Carbon Bloom is an ongoing research project exploring desert carbon sequestration. It was initiatied during the first NEOM Artist Residency. 

The team of the NEOM Regreening Porject is working closely together with various scientific partners across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. One notable collaborator is Prof. Heribert Hirt from the KAUST from the Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering Division. The Prof. Hirt has been supporting NEOM Regreening Project  through his research on the most suitable desert soil microbes. 

He also has been working on a research that supports the idea that oxalogenic desert plants are key to capture atmosphere CO2 and transform it through metabolic processes into new stable carbon crystals. His work on the desert carbon sequestration has by large inspired the artwork Carbon Bloom.

The project imagines desert as an underground forest, where intricate collaborations between different agents are taking place. Processes that need to be safeguared and protected.

The project explores the relationship between the field of ecosystem ecology and the atmospheric nuclear weapons tests that took place in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958.

Ecosystem ecology was developed under the pretence of militarizing ecological knowledge. This is reflected in the language and research methods of its proponents. For example, in his 1957 article “Ecology and the Atomic Age,” the biologist Eugene Odum wrote: 

“Science advances on a broad front [. . .] It is analogous to the advance of an army; a breakthrough may occur anywhere, and when one does it will not penetrate far until the whole front moves up.

Thus, ecologists need not feel bashful about attacking ecosystems so long as they observe the rules of good science.”

These three ceramic sculptures – hybrids comprised of human teeth, coral skeletons and fragments from the hulls of sunken ships – encapsulate the complex relationship between ecosystem ecology and atomic weapons, and in the mineral composition of their elements materially bear witness to the atomic age.

On early Monday hours 5:29 am Mountain War Time, July 16, 1945, the first ever human made nuclear bomb was detonated at the territory that is known today as White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, USA.

A crater that can be compared only with the impact of meteorite crashing in the crust of the earth was left behind. 

The crumbles of green and red glass that covered the desert floor forming a neat circle around ground zero, were later named trinitite. Time capsules of sort solidifying the end of one time and the beginning of another one. 

Mineral records that will testify human presence on earth after we are long gone.

Since then Trinitite has been submitted to XRF, autoradiography and backscattered electron imaging. It has been collected, sold, and bought. It has been used for construction of ant hills. 

It has become part of desert and human ecosystems.

Installation V_br ^ nt*  m ^ tt3r* ed.I consists of six portals resembling a switched off LCD screen and stones made of recycled plastic, each representing a microhistory that the author deems an important landmark in relation to how we relate to the material technologies. Moments once liquefied and frozen for now - exhumation, modernity, body, production line, commodity, and re-crystallization - are lined up on the translucent surfaces. 

The material representation not only acknowledge the reality of crystals enabling the everyday technologies - processes often embodying deeply unethical material realities - but also the phenomena of crystals supposedly countering the negative effects of the same technologies with natural crystal grids blocking radio magnetic waves or chembusters fighting off 5G radiation.

The infinite number of narratives encoded within the material and techno-spiritual gestures. Or to echo Zygmunt Bauman’s “passage from the ‘solid’ to a ‘liquid phase’ of modernity: that is, into a condition in which social forms can no longer keep their shape for long, because they decompose and melt faster than the time it takes to cast them, and once they are cast for them to set”.