anthropoScenes

video art vignettes from the (almost-)Anthropocene

Like water, wind or earthquake, humanity has unwittingly become a geological force in its own right: this is the premise underlying the anthrōpos in "Anthropocene".
But it’s very specific structures that disrupt the Earth System on which all life depends; while the humans & non-humans who bear least responsibility stand to lose the most from its consequences.

Anthropogenic climate change, once set in motion, occupies dimensions largely imperceptible to our senses. Its impacts & interconnections have little regard for borders; cause & effect are dislocated between here & elsewhere; now & elsewhen; between self & other.

Whilst some advocate doubling-down — taking control through geoengineering — others note that we already have the knowledge we need for a more symbiotic relationship with(in) 'nature': to move from mindsets of consumption & exploitation towards an ethos of collaborative planetary stewardship instead.

Might art offer us a point of entry to these ruptures, transitions and interconnections? Firstly to perceive them at all; then to view them from other perspectives?

Teaser video for anthropoScenes I-XII (1’50”) ▶︎
or jump to widescreen version below.
Quick navigation ▼

I : Breakdown

Now Showing in Glasgow Science Centre, The Greenhouse.
🗝 geological time, glacier icebergs, global warming, peak oil

Vorticies swirl on a volcanic beach in Iceland, suggestive of sea level rise and climate chaos caused by global warming.

II : Tideline

Winner, Critics’ Award, Northern Norway Art Prize. Part of the Points of Return exhibition, online & Concord (USA) 2023 🗝sea level rise, weather, sublime

III : Hellishei∂i

1st prize,The Art of Energy exhibition (2021).
🗝 Climate engineering, carbon capture, homeostasis, geoengineering

IV : Adrift (∆Asea-ice)

Taigh Chearsabhagh (UK) ‘21-22'; finalist, Waterhouse Science Art Prize (‘22) et al. 🗝 Climate attribution science, fossil fuel footprint, carbon emissions, sea ice

V : 78ºN +4ºC

Part of Adam’s solo show at Galleri Svalbard, March-August 2020 🗝 Arctic melt, glacial river, coal mining spoil, abstract drone aerial

VI : Mозаика (Mosaic)

Finalist in International Competition for Intermedia Artwork, Krakow, Poland, Nov 2022 🗝 Pyramiden, glacier, coal mining, abandoned, decay

VII : Sikujumaataarpoq

4-screen video installation: Edinburgh Science Festival ‘23; Perth Festival ‘24.
🗝 Greenland, sea ice, language, loss, damage, Inuit, indigenous knowledge

VIII : Escape Velocity

Winner, Earth Photo/Video Prize 2023; Northern Norway Art Prize finalist touring 2023. 🗝 Nature, immanence & transcendence, trans-humanism, hubris

IX : Solastalgia

1st Prize, Cambiamenti Climatici - The Grand Challenge, 2023 (Venice).
🗝 Mountain glacier, loss, melancholia, albedo enhancement, Solastalgia, climate engineering, anthropocene

X : in the Eye of the Anthropocene

(in progress)

XI : Mammoth

Single-screen video about two “mammoth” geoengineering proposals...🗝 De-extinction, CO2 capture, geoengineering, genetic modification, speculative futures, techno-optimism

XII : Iceberg care / a work-in-progress

Video triptych (3 screens) showing at UNESCO Paris for IYGP.
🗝 Glaciers, Icebergs, care, stewardship, repair, Symbiocene, renewal, ecophilia, visual art, ice

anthropoScene XII :

a work-in-progress
a.k.a. Iceberg Care
Dec 2024 (multiscreen video installation) / Jan 2026 (single-screen version)

DESCRIPTION

A lone figure tends to three sublime glacial icebergs frozen into sea ice.

Known to indigenous Inuit as kassoq these are exquisitely coloured formations of translucent glacier ice, created under enormous pressure at the base of the Greenland ice sheet (Sermersuaq) before being transported by the flow of the Qarajaq glacier. They’re likely to be millennia-old.

As the screens loop, bergy bits are repetitively mopped, swept and polished of fallen snow. Their carer’s Sisyphean endeavours are punctuated by moments of connection between him and the ice. (Of course, we can only really ‘know’ the 10% that floats above water…)

Ilulissap eqqaa (a Kalaalisut term for the area surrounding an iluliaq or iceberg) is a dangerous place to be since the sea ice here is fragile and the bergs, eroded from below by warm water, can overturn without warning. Belying their monolithic appearance, icebergs are in constant transformation – by wind, current, solar radiation, precipitation, and now, by manmade climate change.

If glaciers retreat from Greenland’s ice fjords to instead terminate and melt on dry land, they will no longer calve their ice as icebergs.

ARTIST STATEMENT

How might we find ways of being & existing within the “Anthropocene”? Ratification of this contentious proposal — marking a geological epoch characterised by human disruption of the Earth System — was due in mid 2024. However it was unexpectedly 'put on ice' by scientists unable to agree on what event best marked its beginning. But could this administrative anomaly be a small part of some larger rupture in Western narratives that describe our relationship to the non-human world? Moving from mindsets of consumption & exploitation towards care & stewardship; towards becoming ‘Good Ancestors'?

Prising open conceptions of 'nature' sufficiently to accommodate more symbiotic and collaborative approaches with(in) it — as suggested by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht's Symbiocene proposal — is likely to be a long and, like my iceberg cleaning, a clumsy and imperfect work-in-progress.

CRITICAL RESPONSES

“The success of this film is both in the poetry of the gesture and in the simplicity of its technique.”
— (jury comments in awarding it the Special Jury Prize, Films of Return Climate Film Festival)

"...Artists’ concerns with a spectrum of environment issues are a recurrent theme throughout the exhibition...
The exceptional work in this vein is Adam Sébire’s video, anthropoScene XII: iceberg care … an unexpectedly moving testament to the immense challenge of humanity’s responsibility to care for the natural environment."
— Art critic Margot Osborne, InDaily, 21 May 2026.

“This slow, repetitive tending becomes a ritual of attention; yet, one which is aware of its limits (the bergs still melt, overturn and vanish). That humility is the point: care here is not control but the insistence that a relationship be kept.”
— A La Luz (curatorial collective)

"The repetitive cleaning is not, however, a grand technological intervention. Sébire’s gesture evokes forms of domestic and maintenance labor historically feminized and often rendered socially invisible. Caring for the iceberg thus acquires an additional resonance of embodied upkeep associated with cleaning and everyday care… In [his] work, moments of encounter between a human body and what was once imagined as eternal ice suggest a shared condition of finitude: both are moving, albeit at vastly different temporal scales, toward unmaking. Oscillating between care, mourning, and absurdity—and echoing contemporary attempts to preserve glaciers through protective coverings and other technological interventions—the work asks whether our relationships to the Arctic might be reimagined."
— curator Hanna Barbara Hölling, Collegium Helveticum, Zürich.

EXHIBITIONS & PRIZES

CURATORIAL DETAILS

Iceberg Care @ OnBoards Biennale, Antwerp, 2025

The artist cleans three sublime Arctic glacier icebergs frozen into the winter sea ice.

Known to Inuit as kassoq these exquisitely coloured formations of translucent glacier ice were frozen under enormous pressure at the base of the Greenland ice sheet (Sermersuaq), before being transported by the Qarajaq glacier's flow.
They’re likely to be millennia-old.

Anthropogenic global heating is rapidly melting Sermersuaq, likely past its tipping point. If glaciers retreat from these fjords to terminate on dry land, our oceans will still rise, but no longer will they produce such icebergs.

These disappearing entities are repetitively mopped, swept and polished of snow and sediment. Their carer’s Sisyphean endeavours, clumsy and contradictory as they are, are punctuated by moments of connection with the ice – now making its final journey. Can we move away from an increasingly exploitative relationship with the Arctic, towards one of stewardship instead?

Arctic Greenland Climate Change Art - sea ice cracked by an iceberg flipping over

Above: Installation view, Ilulissat Art Museum, Greenland, with the ‘spark’ kicksledge and equipment used for cleaning the icebergs, Sept-Nov 2024.
(Photo/Curators: A.Hoffmann/M.Walters/E.Bourne)

Above: split-screen excerpt of multi-channel version.
Note that each channel loops independently.

Discussion between the artist and University of Edinburgh glaciologist Professor Peter Nienow about the ice being cleaned and the loss of icebergs as glaciers retreat. (Dur: 7'59")

Breakdown shows in Adam Sébire’s AnthropoScenes solo show at Galleri Svalbard, March-August 2020, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the world’s northernmost art museum and inaugurating Longyearbyen’s Solfestuka or Sun Festival. Curator: Jan Martin Berg

anthropoScene I :

Breakdown (2018)

The traffic just seems to be getting worse every day at Iceland's iceberg lagoon, Jökulsárlón...

Breakdown uses dark humour to approach the climate crisis at one of Iceland’s fast-disappearing glaciers, Breiðamerkurjökull.

Its astonishing iceberg procession is reimagined as a traffic jam of epic proportions.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

SCREENINGS

anthropoScene II :

Tideline (2018)

On an island's black-sand beach the high water mark rises relentlessly.

Judges' verdict:

“In this awarded work of the North Norwegian Art Exhibition's Critics Award, 2021, there is a confusion about time. The confusion applies to both the material represented and the technique used. Although water is a volatile and liquid material, the water in this work appears as powerful rock chains, and heavy, dense formations, with a large physical presence. These waves are filmed from above, against a black sandy beach, and in the short video work the movements of the waves are played backwards, in slow motion. Thus, the water's foaming mountain ranges seem to collapse and fall backwards in time, as the video progresses.

This is how the extent of time appears to be unsynchronised, dislocated, and the work provides an opportunity to reflect on a central conflict in the era of the climate crisis: Between humans' short lives and intensive consumption of resources, and nature's slow, inexorable and eternal process. The work is accompanied by a soundtrack from an instrument made of recycled materials, and although the tone is mournful, reuse and this circular economy point the way out of the climate crisis' most powerful and frightening consequences. Back in the video, the waves have washed out the beach and an area of calm water can be seen, but the line between sea and land is creeping ever higher.

The winner of the North Norwegian Art Exhibition's Critics Award, 2021, is Adam Sébire with the work Tideline (2018).”

Filmed with a drone off remote eastern Iceland, reverse motion creates an eerie sense of prolepsis; a prevision of inexorably rising sea levels.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

PRIZES & EXHIBITIONS

Installation view, Fremantle Arts Centre Feb-Apr 2024.
(Curator: Glenn Iseger-Pilkington)

Below: Shots of the CarbFix2 / Climeworks project site in Iceland, 2017-19. You can license any of these shots else contact me directly. Images © 2023 Adam Sébire.

anthropoScene III :

Hellisheiði (2018/2021)

The Climeworks/CarbFix2 project at Hellisheiði, Iceland is the world’s first industrial-scale "carbon scrubbing" experiment to capture carbon dioxide (CO₂) directly from Earth's atmosphere.

This CO₂ is mixed with water and pumped through domed injection wells down into active volcanic regions, where it becomes petrified as rock.

Most climate change policy tacitly assumes the success of such geoengineering experiments — despite many unanswered questions about their viability and long-term consequences.

BACKGROUND:

At COP21 in Paris, December 2015, the world’s leaders stated their “aspiration" to limit global warming to an upper limit of 1.5ºC this century. But if nations fail to decarbonise rapidly enough, there is no way to address overshoot of that target without some form of geoengineering (sometimes termed climate engineering) using technology — untested at scale and some of it with potential side-effects.

Forms of geoengineering known as Solar Radiation Management (SRM) essentially propose that we "hack" the Earth System — or at least fiddle with its thermostat. Another, arguably more benign, approach supported by the UN’s IPCC is Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR). This employs carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies such as seen here.

Since October 2017 Hellishei∂i’s other-worldly test site has been capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air surrounding Reykjavík’s geothermal power station: anthropogenic greenhouse gases are captured, dissolved and sequestered deep within the rock of an active volcano. (In 2021 the project was significantly expanded and codenamed “Orca”; already construction of “Mammoth” is underway.)

Despite being complex, energy intensive and (for now) expensive, CDR has proven politically attractive as a “technofix”, an excuse to delay decarbonisation. Indeed all forms of geoengineering potentially come with what ethical philosophers such as Clive Hamilton identify as “moral hazards”.

Video artist Adam Sébire is drawn to this site for its modern-day alchemy and its post-industrial Promethean overtones: an unshakeable faith in the technological mastery of Homo sapiens.

In the video triptych, one of the three screens investigates the experiments at Hellishei∂i (the injection wells of CarbFix plus Climeworks’ white cube “carbon scrubber” DAC module, a prototype for what’s expected to be many thousands spread across the planet). In another, a core sample of the sequestered CO₂ — now mineralised as calcite within the basalt host rock — appears as a quasi-mystical object in a vitrine (in an exhibition this screen can be replaced by a real core sample). The third screen is more ambiguous: set in a future geological era where complex lifeforms seem to have disappeared, and where the planet is correcting an atmospheric imbalance. Now, geological processes reverse. After only a few hundred thousand years, homeostasis — equilibrium — will have returned.

MORE INFORMATION

TECHNICAL DETAILS

EXHIBITIONS

anthropoScene IV :

Adrift (∆Asea-ice) (2019)

The calculus of one’s own contribution to a warming climate.

Citizens of developed countries are increasingly aware of correlations between our lifestyles and the climate crisis: witness the phenomenon of flygskam or “flying shame”. Borrowing a groundbreaking scientific formula* the filmmaker-artist calculates and saws off the exact amount of Arctic sea-ice (15.69m²) that will be destroyed by his carbon emissions flying economy return, from Sydney to Greenland, to film it (5.23 tonnes of CO₂e).

Adrift (∆Asea-ice) visualises and mythologises the consequences of a Western way of life. It touches upon disconnects — of cause from effect; of emissions here & now from melting there & then — that underly our psychological responses to global warming. Disconnects that have perhaps kept the problem comfortably abstract for us — until now…

ABOUT THE EQUATION:

climate change event attribution — sea ice loss equation
Notz & Stroeve’s equation — ΔAseaice = dFnonSW,in / dECO₂ x ΔECO₂ — states that the total area of sea-ice lost equals a constant — derived from research into energy flux at the ice edge — of 3.0 ± 0.3 square metres per metric tonne of carbon dioxide emitted, multiplied by the sum of emissions. Inserting the artist’s own 5.23 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent into the equation, this works out at 15.69 ± 1.57 m² of sea-ice that will not regenerate naturally in northwest Greenland come winter. With less sea-ice to reflect sunlight back into space the ocean absorbs more heat, contributing to even faster warming in the Arctic.

Adrift (∆Asea-ice) is a video vignette from an Arctic tipping point, bearing witness to our own contribution to climate change. Its multiple screens explore cognitive dissonance; cause & effect; human & cryological time. The soundtrack comprises æolian sounds from an empty water tank at the artist's residence at Upernavik Museum northwest Greenland that 'sings' when it is windy.

REFERENCES & PUBLICATIONS:

* Notz, D., & Stroeve, J. (2016): Observed Arctic sea-ice loss directly follows anthropogenic CO₂ emission. Science, 354, 747–750.

** An article exploring the ideas underlying the artwork was published in Flugschriften volume IV (April 2019):
Sébire, A. (2019). Adrift: Attribution & Responsibility in a Changing Climate. Flugschriften, 4 (Dispatches from The Institute of Incoherent Geography Vol.1), 27–38. (Download the complete publication above else a PDF of just this article here).

EXHIBITIONS

VERSIONS

LOCATION

Single Screen (1 channel) version: UHD 4K screen, stereo audio. Preview.

Publicity image: The artist floats off into Baffin Bay, Greenland atop the 15.79m² of sea ice condemned by the carbon emissions from his flight to get there. Photo © 2019 Adam Sebire.

Video triptych (3 channel video) (preferred) version: 1x 4K screen; 2x ½-size HD screens, 3x Lūpa media players, stereo audio. Preview.

Première at the Max Planck Institute, Munich for Long Night of the Museums, 19 October 2019.

The artist saws through sea ice in a visual art work about climate change

Installation view of Adam Sébire's video triptych AnthropoScene IV : Adrift (∆Asea-ice) at the Long Night of the Munich Museums, October 2019.

anthropoScene V : 78ºN +4ºC (HD HDR preview)

▲ Click to play. Preview only (video is private).

Installation view,
Chengdu Biennale 16July-22Nov 2023.

anthropoScene V :

78ºN +4ºC (2020)

Like an abstract painting in motion, thawing permafrost mixes with soil sediments, mining spill and pieces of coal to change the colours of glacial meltwater along a river in the High Arctic.

Longyearbyen, Svalbard, only 1300km from the North Pole, is warming 5-7 times the global average: 5ºC in the last 20 years. The work was filmed with a drone in early spring, 20 April 2019, as unseasonable temperatures soared well above freezing.

In 1612 the European demand for whale oil marked the beginning of Arctic energy extraction on industrial scale in Svalbard; 300 years later American industrialist John Munro Longyear began extracting coal from the mountains surrounding the main settlement, Longyearbyen.

Now the effects on Earth's climate from burning all of these fossil fuels is rapidly transforming the surrounding Arctic ecosystems, as the circuit between cause & effect collapses.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

EXHIBITIONS

STILL PHOTOGRAPHY

anthropoScene VI :

Mозаика (Mosaic) (2021)

1200km from the North Pole, the Nordenskiöld Glacier's ice crumbles. 12km further on, a canteen for Soviet workers in the abandoned coal mining town of Pyramiden houses a disintegrating mosaic (мозаика) depicting a mythical, pristine Arctic landscape.

The four-channel video (which may be presented as single-channel split-screen as in the preview, right) draws on gestaltist 'visual field force theory' to establish a dialogue between these sites of decay & impermanence.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

EXHIBITIONS

Above: Three Svalbard Mines (still photographs as a triptych, 2018-21). Bookending Svalbard’s coal-mining history, Gruve 2B (right, 1913-1964) and Gruve 7 (left, 1976-2025); in between, the abandoned Soviet mining town of Pyramiden (1910-1998). Each leaches its mineral spoil down melting glacial valleys of this High Arctic archipelago.

Breakdown shows in Adam Sébire’s AnthropoScenes solo show at Galleri Svalbard, March-August 2020, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the world’s northernmost art museum and inaugurating Longyearbyen’s Solfestuka or Sun Festival. Curator: Jan Martin Berg

JUST COMPLETED! In January 2025, Sikoqqinngisaannassooq, a companion documentary to Sikujumaataarpoq, explores what sea ice means to the indigenous residents has just been completed and can accompany the exhibition as an educational resource once the film festival exclusivity period is over. A teaser (the first minute of the opening sequence) is show here.

anthropoScene VII :

Sikujumaataarpoq (2022-2023)

Multi-screen 4 channel video artwork.

An immersive audiovisual installation from a remote part of Earth's melting polar regions, where water is found in its solid form. Video vignettes linked by West Greenlandic words for this icy environment focus on the humans & non-humans whose existence there is undergoing rapid transformation. Its audio samples ice sounds collected by cryosphere scientists working around the globe.

Sikujumaataarpoq is the Kalaallisut word meaning "sea ice formation is delayed”.

BACKGROUND

Uummannaq Island is a small indigenous Inuit settlement placed well above the Arctic Circle in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) at 70.7º North. This four-channel work was filmed during the 3-month polar night when the sun remains resolutely below the horizon till February. It's a season when outsiders vanish and locals get down to business on sea frozen solid. At least that’s what used to happen; under the influence of climate change the Earth’s poles are warming 2-4 times more rapidly than the rest of our planet.

Many of Uummannaq's 1,400 residents recall being able to travel by dog sledge across thickly-frozen sea ice to settlements dotting the fjord from the Christmas holidays until May, most years. But ice coverage and stability have decreased dramatically over the last decade. In 2022, the fjord would provide barely two months of reliably solid sea ice for on-ice activities such as hunting, ice-fishing, dog sledging and community events.

The changes to everyday life and traditions are as profound as they are to the fragile environment. Unable to use sledge dogs or boats easily, the months-long interregnum between open water and solid sea ice poses great difficulties for these First Nations inhabitants living remote, semi-subsistence existences.

For the filmmaker, waiting for the sea ice to form in the dark and cold was relieved by pilgrimages to sublime inland ice, polished slippery and snowless by unusually strong, warm winds. Beneath its cracked surface were trapped bubbles of methane, a potent greenhouse gas and, along with sea ice loss, a potential Arctic "tipping point” capable of triggering further rapid climatic transformation across our planet.

Kalaallisut words for this icy environment dot the video vignettes like waypoints emerging from beneath melting snows.

RESIDENCY

PRODUCTION CREDITS

TECHNICAL DETAILS & VERSIONS

EXHIBITIONS

anthropoScene VIII :

Escape Velocity (2023)

Vertical Video and digital print.
Music composed by Martin Fondse.

A frozen Arctic lake.
Methane bubbles loiter beneath its scarred surface.
A man tries to cross, but falls hard on the ice.

A short meditation on our relationship with our planet
(and the desire by some to take flight from it altogether).

The work was provoked by hubristic arguments from certain self-proclaimed "technovisionaries" that our species' regenerative future does not lie on Earth. Theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls this 'The Mindset' — "a belief that with enough money and technology, wealthy men can live as gods and transcend the calamities that befall everyone else. It’s a way of applying the 'exit strategy' of a Silicon Valley startup to civilization itself."

In August 2024*, stratigraphic scientists are expected to declare that we, once passengers, now crew of spaceship Earth, have departed the benign Holocene epoch and crossed the frontiers of the Anthropocene.

But we can never achieve 'escape velocity' from nature; it is us and we are of it. Our regeneration — and perhaps our redemption — may come not through taking flight from our injured planet, but from being brought back to Earth … with a thud.

"We will use technology to tame nature," he promised.
(And to insulate ourselves from the events we'd caused ...though this bit was left unspoken...)
"If all else fails," he continued, “then we will colonise Mars instead."

But our technovisionary never achieved escape velocity.

He had left the Holocene — now striding confidently towards the Anthropocene — yet he could not escape from nature:
it was he and he was of it.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

EXHIBITIONS

Still (120cm x 80cm, Edition of 9 - 80:20 Artist Agency) A$2500

Link to 44” teaser is here | 3’30” film (private preview) above.

Solastalgia - example of stills.

“Solastalgia” is Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s term that describes feeling alienation or distress in familiar or beloved surroundings due to environmental desolation – such as that caused by climate change.

anthropoScene IX :

Solastalgia (2024)

A dying mountain glacier; its body shrouded to stem the loss of ice. Yet the melt continues.

The humans have tried to insulate it, but might the treatment be worse than the illness?

On the opposite side of the valley a steam train, icon of the fossil-fuelled Industrial Revolution, passes through a landscape that was filled with this glacier’s ice a mere century ago.

Filmed Summer 2022, when Swiss glaciers lost 6% of their mass; the largest melt on record.

*JURY'S COMMENTS (HENKI ART PRIZE 2024)
Adam Sébire’s film poignantly captures humanity’s impact on a fragile Swiss glacier, its shrouded ice evoking a haunting sense of nature in distress. Depicting water in its various forms, ice, liquid, and steam, the work reflects the urgency of climate change. Its ethereal beauty and profound message leave a lasting impression.”

MUSIC CREDITS

TECHNICAL DETAILS

EXHIBITIONS & PRIZES

anthropoScene X :

in the Eye of the Anthropocene
(work in progress, 2021-28)

Video polyptych, ca. 15 mins. Expected completion: 2028.

Only 1,300km from the North Pole, Svalbard’s abandoned 'Santa Claus' Mine (Gruve 2B) spills mineral spoil down former glacial valleys. As snow and ice retreat, traces of coal fallen from the collapsed aerial cableway reveal an eyelid: a slumbering creature on the verge of awakening.

Combining digital effects and documentary footage this video uses multiscreen forms to explore Svalbard’s extractivist past, rapidly melting present and more-than-human future. In imaging the ‘landscape' as alive the work eschews both anthropomorphism and the ‘apocalyptic sublime' to instead consider our environment as an active agent: one that humans have stirred with unpredictable consequences.

As some theorists urge us to embrace ‘dark ecology’ and the ‘monster’ we have created — to 'stay with the trouble’ — the work seeks a mythological, expanded cinema approach. It draws on aesthetics of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptychs to think beyond human agency to the nonhuman world and the active forces that we have set in motion but now struggle to comprehend, in the planet’s most rapidly-changing environment.

Norway has promised to cease coal mining in the Arctic within seven years, but already Svalbard is warming 1.7°C per decade: seven times the global average. In 2024, stratigraphic scientists declined to formally ratify our epoch as "the Anthropocene”, in part because the proposed start date, a “golden spike” of radioactive sediment from the 1950s, was considered too specific to represent the changes of era, in which a specific group of humans have profoundly altered the equilibrium of the Earth System over several centuries.

Filmed over the course of four seasons whilst resident at Galleri Svalbard.

in the Eye of the Anthropocene (still from the video installation).

in the Eye of the Anthropocene (still from the video installation).
The remains of the aerial cable-way for coal mine Nº2b, "Santa Claus Mine", surrounded by oxidised mineral spoil on a mountain in Nybyen, Svalbard, 1300km from the North Pole.
© Adam Sébire.

Stills from Mammoth

anthropoScene XI :

Mammoth (2024)

Film: Adam Sébire • Music: Martin Franke

Mammoth is a video art work superimposing two climate engineering (geoengineering) projects that are currently funded & underway.

One is Pleistocene Park and Colossal Inc.'s proposal to genetically engineer woolly mammoths back from extinction, reintroducing them to melting Arctic tundra to “re-wild" it as before Homo sapiens arrived. This dramatic intervention in nature, its proponents hope, would lock thawing methane deposits back into the permafrost, averting a disastrous climate tipping point.

The other is Climeworks Corporation's carbon dioxide removal plant under construction in Iceland, capable of direct air capture of 4000 tonnes of CO₂ annually, a prototype for a project the company has codenamed Mammoth.

These two “mammoth” entrepreneurial geoengineering endeavours are set in counterpoint. The story is told over documentary footage showing construction of the carbon capture machines in Iceland; while in voiceover from some future vantage point an A.I. recounts a speculative history of the de-extinction project, resulting in humanity's unforeseen demise from the gene-modified mammoths’ own methane emissions.

Paste the ABOUT THE MUSIC text here.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

EXHIBITIONS

anthropoScene XII : (see above - latest work)

Critical / Media Reception

Media coverage

Podcasts, Zooms & Interviews

Academic references

Posters, Books, etc.

Critiques

Teaser video for anthropoScenes I-XII (1’50”) ▶︎

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Adam Sébire

Based in the Norwegian Arctic; filmmaking anywhere...

Images & text © MMXXVI adamsebire@gmail.com
DMI DataMining of photos & videos prohibited except for search engine indexing.

Update October ’26: Site migration to
100% renewable energy webservers in Europe is complete!
Older project content is still being ported across.

anthropoScenes

video art vignettes from the (almost-)Anthropocene

I : Breakdown

II : Tideline

III : Hellishei∂i

IV : Adrift (∆Asea-ice)

V : 78ºN +4ºC

VI : Mозаика (Mosaic)

VII : Sikujumaataarpoq

VIII : Escape Velocity

IX : Solastalgia

X : in the Eye of the Anthropocene

XI : Mammoth

XII : Iceberg care / a work-in-progress

anthropoScene XII :

a work-in-progress a.k.a. Iceberg Care Dec 2024 (multiscreen video installation) / Jan 2026 (single-screen version)

Iceberg Care @ OnBoards Biennale, Antwerp, 2025

Above: Installation view, Ilulissat Art Museum, Greenland, with the ‘spark’ kicksledge and equipment used for cleaning the icebergs, Sept-Nov 2024. (Photo/Curators: A.Hoffmann/M.Walters/E.Bourne)

Above: split-screen excerpt of multi-channel version.Note that each channel loops independently.

Breakdown shows in Adam Sébire’s AnthropoScenes solo show at Galleri Svalbard, March-August 2020, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the world’s northernmost art museum and inaugurating Longyearbyen’s Solfestuka or Sun Festival. Curator: Jan Martin Berg

anthropoScene I :

Breakdown (2018)

anthropoScene II :

Tideline (2018)

Installation view, Fremantle Arts Centre Feb-Apr 2024. (Curator: Glenn Iseger-Pilkington)

Below: Shots of the CarbFix2 / Climeworks project site in Iceland, 2017-19. You can license any of these shots else contact me directly. Images © 2023 Adam Sébire.

anthropoScene III :

Hellisheiði (2018/2021)

anthropoScene IV :

Adrift (∆Asea-ice) (2019)

Single Screen (1 channel) version: UHD 4K screen, stereo audio. Preview.

Publicity image: The artist floats off into Baffin Bay, Greenland atop the 15.79m² of sea ice condemned by the carbon emissions from his flight to get there. Photo © 2019 Adam Sebire.

Video triptych (3 channel video) (preferred) version: 1x 4K screen; 2x ½-size HD screens, 3x Lūpa media players, stereo audio. Preview.

Première at the Max Planck Institute, Munich for Long Night of the Museums, 19 October 2019.

▲ Click to play. Preview only (video is private).

Installation view,Chengdu Biennale 16July-22Nov 2023.

anthropoScene V :

78ºN +4ºC (2020)

anthropoScene VI :

Mозаика (Mosaic) (2021)

Breakdown shows in Adam Sébire’s AnthropoScenes solo show at Galleri Svalbard, March-August 2020, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the world’s northernmost art museum and inaugurating Longyearbyen’s Solfestuka or Sun Festival. Curator: Jan Martin Berg

anthropoScene VII :

Sikujumaataarpoq (2022-2023)

anthropoScene VIII :

Escape Velocity (2023)

Still (120cm x 80cm, Edition of 9 - 80:20 Artist Agency) A$2500

Link to 44” teaser is here | 3’30” film (private preview) above.

Solastalgia - example of stills.

anthropoScene IX :

Solastalgia (2024)

anthropoScene X :

in the Eye of the Anthropocene (work in progress, 2021-28)

in the Eye of the Anthropocene (still from the video installation).

in the Eye of the Anthropocene (still from the video installation).The remains of the aerial cable-way for coal mine Nº2b, "Santa Claus Mine", surrounded by oxidised mineral spoil on a mountain in Nybyen, Svalbard, 1300km from the North Pole. © Adam Sébire.

Stills from Mammoth

anthropoScene XI :

Mammoth (2024)

anthropoScene XII : (see above - latest work)

Critical / Media Reception

Podcasts, Zooms & Interviews

Academic references

— Jungle World #48/2024 (Berlin)

Adam’s photos on show for Climate Outreach at Sydney Opera House April 2023

Exhibition poster featuring Adrift still.

Critiques

Teaser video for anthropoScenes I-XII (1’50”) ▶︎ Back to top of page ▲

Adam Sébire

Based in the Norwegian Arctic; filmmaking anywhere...

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a work-in-progress
a.k.a. Iceberg Care
Dec 2024 (multiscreen video installation) / Jan 2026 (single-screen version)

Above: Installation view, Ilulissat Art Museum, Greenland, with the ‘spark’ kicksledge and equipment used for cleaning the icebergs, Sept-Nov 2024.
(Photo/Curators: A.Hoffmann/M.Walters/E.Bourne)

Above: split-screen excerpt of multi-channel version.
Note that each channel loops independently.

Installation view, Fremantle Arts Centre Feb-Apr 2024.
(Curator: Glenn Iseger-Pilkington)

Installation view,
Chengdu Biennale 16July-22Nov 2023.

in the Eye of the Anthropocene
(work in progress, 2021-28)

in the Eye of the Anthropocene (still from the video installation).
The remains of the aerial cable-way for coal mine Nº2b, "Santa Claus Mine", surrounded by oxidised mineral spoil on a mountain in Nybyen, Svalbard, 1300km from the North Pole.
© Adam Sébire.

Teaser video for anthropoScenes I-XII (1’50”) ▶︎

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