How to Read a Changing Earth? Live Annotation of the Searsville Reservoir Sediment Core

What do Earth’s archives reveal? How has human activity inscribed itself into the Earth? And how can a defunct reservoir in Northern California point to wider histories of globalization and colonization as well as speculative futures of mass extinction? Through live annotation of a sediment core from the Searsville Reservoir, the final event of Unearthing the Present will uncover the anthropogenic markers inscribed into this stratigraphic material and explore how the material archive of the Searsville Dam witnesses biodiversity loss, unfulfilled political-economic dreams, the activation of tipping points and a planet entering a new epoch. Within the Earth Indices exhibition of Giulia Bruno and Armin Linke, the Stanford University scientists who produced this material research will enter a dialogue with the audience through a rereading of the original-scale scan of the twelve-meter drill core. This discussion will be accompanied by Marc Evanstein’s musical interpretation of the recorded pollen in the core, a composition reflecting the reservoir’s past and ongoing environmental change.

With Anthony D. Barnosky, Elizabeth A. Hadly and Allison Stegner

Filmed by artists Giulia Bruno and Armin Linke