Mika Tohmon

About

In 1927, there was a small hole, a man’s height, in the white cliffs of Botany Bay, Margate, at the edge of England, end of the Thames. By 1965 this hole was a grand arch with just enough ground to tread above. In 2023, when I visited, the arch had collapsed, forming a stack. By 2120, the Isle of Thanet as whole might detach from us, just like 5000 years ago, when that name meant it.

Chalk is a monolithic gravestone of coccoliths—carbon-clad microorganisms thriving 140 million years ago, in the Cretaceous (of chalk) era. Silently snowing, oozing, compacting to the ocean floor, they/it regulate(s/d) oxygen and water levels, terraforming systems that anticipate us.

We now anticipate the Chthulucene, entangled with electronic and carbon life. Can our cyborg selves self-engineer, like coccoliths, smaller and smaller with planetary ebbs, til we become / you / again?

Mika Tohmon is a visual media artist and graphic designer. As an artist I am a speculative eco-feminist, making in entanglement with electronic and carbon subjects, invoking the coming geological era as an extension of the coil of past and present ones. As a graphic designer I explore the intersection of this practice with de-colonial, feminist perspectives, with my peers as 1/4 of the newly formed SPILLLL Collective.