Aral, Mars
10.5 Minutes, HD Video and stereo audio
2020
Statement
Aral, Mars is a tale set in three times and places: the Aral Sea/past, Dubai/present, and Mars/future. It tells the story of water use and environmental change through these vignettes. Shot in several countries, it tracks the disappearance of the sea, the rise of Dubai, and our future life on Mars. It is shot in a documentary style with slow shots and written text. It is both cautionary and hopeful. It paints a story that is at times—dystopian, utopian, and normalized.
The shrinking Aral Sea, the greening of Dubai, and a future on Mars are the themes in this video dealing with water’s importance to development. Water is set to be one of the 21st century’s driving issues. Sea levels are rising, drinking water is becoming scarcer, hydroelectric dams are getting bigger or demolished, irrigation is turning desert into farmland, farmland is turning to desert, bottled water often costs more than gasoline.
The Aral Sea has gone from the fourth largest lake on earth to a barren wasteland due to bad water management. Meanwhile, Dubai has developed technology to desalinate enormous amounts of seawater thus allowing the greening of the desert and a booming population. Many of the lessons from Aral and Dubai can be used to help with human inhabitation of Mars, a hyper-desert with little to no water. Piled on top is a desire for the future of human (and more-than human) inhabitation not to repeat the past of settler colonialism’s horrors.
Shrinking seas, shifting sands, and migrating around the Solar System, these are the passages of the ongoing project to think about the past, present, and future of water usage. Learning from the past to change our futures to ones that are more just and more sustainable.
Music
Wenn Die Erde So Wird Wie Der Mars
Monolismethic
2009 Silence Sirens Record
licensed under a Creative Commons License