The climate crisis, an expression of colonial-capitalist violence, continues to intensify in real-time. Oceanic frontline communities have long had to navigate changing ecosystems, though these transformations are now more frequent with a greater range of variability. Until now, cultures of reciprocity between people, lands and waters have supported the lived experiences of these changes. For those not along the so-called frontlines, the climate crisis is seen and experienced differently, often mediated by social networks. Disasters become spectacles to be posted across platforms, content to be subsumed into existing narratives, and sometimes, as evidence to be presented and examined before tribunals and courts of law.

Looking directly into the space between how climate change is experienced and how it is imaged, AM Kanngieser and சிந்துஜன் வரதராஜா (Sinthujan Varatharajah) scrutinise the erasure of the causes and reasons for the unfolding ecocide along the frontlines. In Oceanic Refractions, they train their respective lenses on the politics of disaster visibility and the allure of environmental content to examine how images, ideas, projections – even fantasies – of the climate crisis are leveraged and adapted to defer the responsibility for climate crises from global systems of violence onto acts of individual moral goodness.

Oceanic Refractions (AM Kanngieser (AU/DE), KMRU (KE/DE), Laisiasa Dave Lavaki (FJ), Mere Nailatikau (FJ), and Tumeli Tuqota (FJ)) is an immersive installation on display at silent green Kuppelhalle and features testimonies of Fijian, i-Kiribati and Papua New Guinean elders on kinship, self-determination and care in the face of global ecocide. Oceanic Refractions is co-produced by CTM Festival and transmediale with funding by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds (German Capital Culture Fonds), Creative Australia, and with support from the European Commission.