Submerged Territories: Time and Space Died Yesterday

Time and Space died yesterday. There came into our possession a jumbled collection of damaged and unverifiable artefacts. A large quantity of faded 35mm slides. Careful examination of this debris began to suggest to us the possibility of notional, obscured territories, spaces both real and imaginary. Previously unimaginable topographies that seemed to simultaneously inhabit the past, the present and perhaps even the future. What we discovered is neither linear in its historical mapping, nor ordered. ABOVE US THE WAVES Beneath the North Sea, about 60 or 70 miles from the nearest land, lies the Dogger Bank. This large, underwater plateau, a region larger than the United Kingdom, was lost to the sea over a period of 11,000 years. It has been described as one of the most enigmatic archaeological landscapes of northwestern Europe. How are we to investigate or interpret this extraordinary, but largely inaccessible landscape? Stories of a mythical and submerged land have long been told in the fishing communities around the North Sea. These stories were given credence by the bones of large, often extinct, land mammals which were occasionally dredged up from the sea-bed in peaty clumps called ‘moorlog’. When the trawl boats or ‘Doggers’ as they were known, first fished the Dogger Bank, it was common practice to break up the large cakes of ‘moorlog’ and discard the detritus in deeper water. Whilst a few of the blocks and some of the bones they contained were brought back to Yarmouth as curiosities, no reliable record seems to have been kept of any of the finds. Generative four channel installation with audio. Ben Branagan, Luke Pendrell, Eva Verhoeven and Seamus White