SINA HENSEL

is a Brussels based visual artist and researcher with a special focus on critical colour practices. They include the question of various ecologies of colour and the kaleidoscopic transformations caused by the current and future chemical make-ups of landscapes and environments.

What Colour Is the Anthropocene? Oceanic Colour Practices for Future Ecologies

PhD project at the Art Academy Basel/CH, University of Arts Linz/AUS, Humboldt University Berlin/GER, RWTH Aachen University/GER and KASK School of Arts Ghent/BE (https://makesensephd.ch/#/project?id=20)

This embodied PhD research explores oceanic colouring agents as a site of relation, material memory, transformation, and ecological practice. Thinking with microalgae and cyanobacteria and their ability to colour-shift in response to environmental change, it asks what these chromatic lives might teach us about sensing and navigating a wounded, destabilising Earth. Borrowing Hannah Landecker’s question, “What color is the Anthropocene?”¹, their hues become not only signals but also storytelling devices: of liquid thresholds of harm, displaced species and ecologies, traumatised sensoria, collaborative contamination and lifeboat resonances.

This project unfolds through movements rather than chapters, as it plunges towards an oceanic relationality. It begins by tracing kaleidoscopic encounters within diverse waterscapes and their shore companions. Orange lagoons, green-blue lakes, red birds, and blue dogs each articulate a hue of the Anthropocene: control, sunburn, pollution, and exhaustion. These encounters foreground colour as an ecological trace that emerges through interdependent relations between organisms, waterscapes, anthropocentric violence and climate vulnerabilities. The second movement slows down with the patient pigments of microalgae and cyanobacteria in a Brussels home, where colour becomes companion and method, shaping feminist and oceanic ways of knowing. The third movement unfolds collectively through provocations such as colour walking, sensory note-taking, and collaboration reporting, developing alternative methods for making and thinking with more-than-human colour ecologies. Ultimately, the project proposes that to study colour is to study relationality itself: the complex, shimmering negotiation between porous, entangled life and its mysterious, ever-changing conditions.

1 Landecker, H. (2020). Foreword In C. Sections (Ed.), Salmon: A red Herring. Isolarii.Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Claudia Mareis, Prof. Dr. Gloria Meynen, Maria Boto Ordonez