S.o.S.S. (Sisyphus on Salisbury Sands)
A ready-made, durational, environmental, entropic, land-art, immersive performance-installation for the age of climate collapse.
25-01-25
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I first conceived this work between February and March 2024 in response to news about the building of a huge sand dune to protect homes at Salisbury Beach (Massachusetts, USA) and it's almost immediate erosion (see here). The work explores the tension between human efforts to stave off environmental collapse and the unyielding forces of nature.
The work was then declared and titled as a ready-made on 25th January 2025. The piece is an evolving and dynamic collaboration between human and non-human performers, local and global forces: the weather; sea currents; waves; sand; beachfront homes and their inhabitants; contracted companies; teams working with trucks and various types of diggers to create artificial dunes; increasing and unrelenting coastal erosion; raising sea levels; various levels of government, as well as private endeavours; and climate collapse. The piece reimagines the concept of the ready-made in a contemporary context by taking Marcel Duchamp's idea and applying it, not to an existing object, but to a large-scale ongoing environmental event. In doing so, it transforms the event into a living artwork. By giving it a title and framing it as as a work of art, the work highlights the paradoxical Sisyphean cycles in the attempts to secure properties against worsening coastal erosion. |
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the king of Corinth who was condemned by the gods to eternally roll a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down each time he neared the top. This endless, futile task symbolises the struggle against absurdity and meaninglessness. In Existentialism, particularly in Albert Camus' essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Sisyphus represents the human condition: the search for meaning in an indifferent universe, and the defiance of life's inherent absurdity through perseverance.
To mark the creation of the work, I created a series of collages and re-edited audio tracks on 25th January 2025. The images are taken from news articles about the building of defensive sand dunes and their erosion. The audio track samples Wim Merten's 'Circles' from the album Maximising the Audience (1988). In looping and overplaying reversed versions of the extract, the music is simultaneously doing and undoing itself - paralleling the Sisyphean sand cycles on Salisbury Beach.
The work is entropic because a sandcastle is a perfect metaphor for entropy, reflecting the natural tendency for systems to move from order to disorder. According to the second law of thermodynamics, energy tends to disperse, and systems evolve toward greater randomness. As a sandcastle stands on the beach, it slowly succumbs to the forces of wind and waves, its once-structured form breaking down into smaller, chaotic grains of sand. Just as the castle’s organized shape dissipates over time, the law of entropy shows how energy and matter naturally move toward a state of increasing disorder, unless energy is applied to maintain order.
The work is entropic because a sandcastle is a perfect metaphor for entropy, reflecting the natural tendency for systems to move from order to disorder. According to the second law of thermodynamics, energy tends to disperse, and systems evolve toward greater randomness. As a sandcastle stands on the beach, it slowly succumbs to the forces of wind and waves, its once-structured form breaking down into smaller, chaotic grains of sand. Just as the castle’s organized shape dissipates over time, the law of entropy shows how energy and matter naturally move toward a state of increasing disorder, unless energy is applied to maintain order.
The work will be considered finished and complete
once all houses have been washed away by rising sea levels.
Date to be confirmed.
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“In a world that is already so full of stuff, where resources to produce stuff are becoming scarcer, where the carbon footprint of producing even more stuff is ever present, where wastefulness and programmed obsolescence are fundamental parts of the economic system – what is the need to make a new artwork from scratch, when one is already staring me in the face.”
| press_release_-_artist_based_in_birmingham__uk__declares_coastal_erosion_of_salirbusry_beach__massachusetts_usa__as_an_artwork_on_january_25_2025..pdf |
