ANTHROPOCENE
VOLUME 2
CONTENTS
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Editorial
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Anne Barandiaran • Michelle Harris
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Oliver Luff • Michelle Harris
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Sean Kankam
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Shanice Attram
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Chloee Allen • Rachel Deane
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Dominika Goraus •
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Samuel Pinches • Lucas Ribeiro Dos Santos
Simche Williams
28 Nick Hristev
Cover image by Chloee Allen Editorial image by Sean Kankam Back cover image by Anne Barandiaran
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Kayleigh Ball • Jordan Jones
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Cristian Vatavu
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Contributors
Anthropocene Volume 2 brings together photographers and journalists from the University of East London to explore the first geological age defined by man’s dominance over the environment. The diverse sections below were designed with enormous skill and great patience by Joe Verity. Anne Barandiaran sculpts 200 ‘disposable’ coffee cups into a provocation that she photographs with people by The Thames, while Michelle Harris’ interview delves behind the project. Michelle’s copy - this time a prose poem that questions the proliferation of tower blocks - also accompanies the work of Oliver Luff, whose immovable abstracted towers dominate three pages.
In ‘Urbanisation’ Kayleigh Ball shows us that concrete has not quite conquered all, while Jordan Jones provides data on what we all do with these precious green spaces. The volume ends with Christian Vatavu’s clever take on the Goldsworthy method of organising natural elements into patterns, in which trash has now also invaded the composition. Although these pieces are about the dark side of human activity, the care and creativity that has gone into them prompt us to celebrate human activity as well!
EDITORIAL
Sam Pinches plays deftly with scale to point out that small acts of waste eventually add up to something monumental, while Lucas Dos Santos’ copy draws inspiration from Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal to imagine an outlandish solution to starvation. The powerful message carried by the four striking portraits of one person created by Nick Hristev is delivered with a subtlety that requires no explanation.
SIMON MI LES
Sean Kankam turns his camera towards the varied expressions of environmental protestors as they march through the rain towards an uncertain future. In Shanice Attram’s work an infinite landscape of of zeros and ones - and the digital light from a phone - suggest minds forever altered by technology. Chloee Allen - who also has a compelling image on the cover - plunges us beneath the surface of the oceans we pollute, where we float in a tangle of our own debris. Rachel Deane’s copy then uses fantasy to conjure up a powerful sense of rage. Dominika Goraus’ work reminds us that prêt-à-porter too often means prêt-à-jeter, prompting Simche Williams to own up to her own surfeit of party wear.
JOURNALIST: MICHELLE HARRIS
WAS TELAN D
ANNE BARANDIARAN 4 Anthropocene
Street photographer Anne Barandiaran wants takeaway coffee lovers to be more aware of the environmental harm all those disposable cups are causing. So she’s recycled a load of cups into a sculpture, armed herself with the facts, and started touring the sculpture around town. Anne’s sculpture uses 200 cups, which according to her adds up to what “each typical person working in the city” would get through on average every six months. “I want to confront people visually with our careless throwaway habits,” she said, “and to remind people why making a conscious effort to change our daily habits is so important.” Anne has been committed to environmental issues since an early age. She was raised in the beautiful rural area of Pamplona in Spain, and has fond memories of hiking Monte San Cristobal. Over the years she has noticed summers in Pamplona get hotter, and is alarmed by the apparent pace and extent of climate change. Anne accepts that more and more people share her concerns, but worries that they don’t know how to “actively change” things. “That’s why I wanted to create something that would grab their attention,” she said, “ and to speak with people about the little changes they can make…” by using metal or bamboo straws, and reusable bags, water bottles, and of course coffee cups! I spoke to Anne soon after her first outing with the sculpture – which was to London’s South Bank. “I got a lot of funny looks from people,” she admitted, “which in turn helped
to create a lot of memorable conversations. Just as coffee notoriously helps bring us together to have sometimes even the most difficult conversations, I feel my sculpture has done the same.” Most people agreed with Anne that waste was damaging the planet, but only one family seemed to know much about precisely how. “Some people talked about the inconvenience of carrying reusable things… because they take up too much space - but I told them about the existence of collapsible bottles, coffee cups, and straws.” Anne was startled to find out little many people knew about reusable products available. made me sad to think how many not being correctly informed,” said.
how the “It are she
Recycling disposable coffee cups is problematic. Though they are made largely of paper, they are also lined with plastic polyethylene, which is tightly bonded to the paper to keep the cups waterproof. Anne told me this meant that “… the majority of cups cannot be recycled at standard recycling plants, and must instead be taken to special facilities – only three of which exist in the UK.” Apparently less than one per cent of coffee cups ever get recycled. A report by the Environmental Audit committee has recommended that a 25p “latte levy” per cup should be imposed to improve the recycling situation; and that there should be a total ban by 2023.
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6 Anthropocene
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LIV IN G WIT H G RE E D
OLIVER LUFF
What Is The Future Of Our City?
8 Anthropocene
JO UR NAL IS T: MI CHE LL E H AR R IS
London is predicted to home ten million people by 2029. Fears mount as job opportunities and train services struggle to align. In 1960 Physicist and Philosopher Heinz von Forster declared, that Friday 13th 2026 would be a day that should be feared. He wrote: “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death. They will be squeezed to death.” Perhaps on the Central Line? For the veins of our city will surely be confined. And so, the growing population questions the benefits of urbanisation: cancerous or benign? Urbanists Jane Jacobs and Richard Rogers have extolled the virtues of the crowded city. Dense cities are “far more environmentally and socially sustainable” they say. But Pauline from Pimlico prefers to believe what Shelter’s calculations convey: “255,000 people have no permanent home” these days. As investors haggle for land, their developments reach for the stars. And what was once “home” is now replaced by swanky buildings and bars. Instead of affordable housing to buy, we get luxury developments - those “streets in the sky.” So, what will become of the democratic city that the Smithsons once envisioned, when gentrification is what’s favoured and what is being commissioned? Those streets in the sky take on a whole new meaning. The Smithsons’ dreams of an interconnected community is now not the feeling. Equality appears demolished along
with Robin Hood Gardens? And attitudes to affordable housing are consequently hardened. Streets in the sky may reduce landuse intensity, but what about the effects on our Earth’s biochemistry? Skyscrapers present a complicated blue print, and one that is stamped with a large carbon footprint. In the past decade a new height category was created, for skyscrapers known as “megatons” (over 1979 ft tall), and their sustainability has been debated. The future of our city is in the hands of our architects. But have they considered the extent of the after effects? Millennium Tower in San Francisco is said to be sinking. With sea levels also rising what on Earth were they thinking? Literally ground-breaking heights that are extremely compromising. “How much can our land take?” is the question photographer Oliver Luff is emphasising. Tall buildings contribute to up to a third of the anthropogenic heat produced in urban areas. Creating an urban heat island (UHI) has effects that are significantly precarious. A sustainable vertical city may not be attainable, if these negative impacts are not containable. So what should the future of our city be?
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P LANE T CO NC ER N
SEAN KANKAM
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14 Anthropocene
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16 Anthropocene
MEDIA IN FLUEN C E ON T HE MIN D
SHANICE AT TRAM
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J O URN ALIS T: RACHE L DE A N E
Seventy one percent of the Earth’s surface belongs me.
trawlers discard their unwanted nets overboard into me.
Humans have abused their power and through plastic polluting they have caused extinction of some of the animals that live in my depths. They have also induced climate change and caused my sea levels to rise.
The musky, thick, worn discarded net entangled her pale blue body. She flew with the swirls of my waves. She reaped no mercy from the depths of the ocean. As she struggled trying to untangle herself, tugging in despair; she was forced to look into the reflection of humankind’s careless waste disposal.
Do they not know or care that I provide a living for them, and food for them. I govern their weather and keep their air clean, but they still dare to insult me weekly, daily and by the minute. Humans have taken me for granted for far too long. It amazed me that a human could be so beautiful yet so harmful. Her blood red gown had death seething all over it as she drifted past the swarm of jellyfish, or were they plastic bags? We cannot tell the difference nowadays.
EN G ULFED
CHLOEE ALLEN
So how selfishly unjust was it to expect me to keep her alive when her kind had made an absolute mockery of me? Did she expect to enter my waters and feel none of the pain my creatures endure?
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Fifteen of my ocean animals have become extinct because of you. Turtles consume plastic bags mistaken for jellyfish. Around 6% of all my turtles are found entangled in your debris each year, around 90% of them already dead and those that aren’t are suffering from sores or sepsis. Then there are your boats and ships: bigger, taller and faster each year, pumping their hazardous waste and sewage into me. And your fishing
The rage I had felt rising inside me, like a storm fed by all of the toxic substances and rubbish you have carelessly polluted into me, calmed. Those substances include about 14 million tonnes of trash each year, of which between five and 12 million tonnes is plastic waste that will take over 400 years to break down. There was no need to seek the very revenge I had been waiting for. She was already subject to the gravest consequence of human actions: death. She began to sink. My waters just entered more through her red lips each time she tried to open her mouth. I could see the fear in her eyes, that ironically reminded me of the expressions of my creatures when they were summoned to death by the humans. She started to turn paler, becoming weaker and less able to resist her fate. She lost the battle, exhaling her last breath. She began to float so elegantly, as if she and her kind would never harm a thing. Her soft whispered gasp was the last noise to co-exist with the noise of my underwater current until it eventually faded out, engulfing her.
The consequences I describe are already happening without my help. The toxic chemicals that leach out of your plastic are already found in the blood and tissue of nearly all of you. Exposure to them is already linked to cancers, birth defects, impaired immunity and all those other ailments that flow from that. The pollution in your air is already affecting every organ and virtually every cell in your bodies. Around seven million of you are dying from your toxic air already every year and if this continues who knows what lies in store for you. Do you know what the most ironic part of all this is? Humans are not only killing me, they are also killing themselves.
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#N OT HIN G _ TO _ WE A R
DOMINIKA GORAUS 22 Anthropocene
J OUR NA LI ST: S IM CHE WILLIAMS
My Eyes are Bigger than my Wardrobe Who is guilty of buying more than they can wear? Who wastes money on buying new shoes and clothes when they already have plenty that they haven’t even tried on yet?
spending more than £3,000 on clothing in an average year. Eighteen per cent said they only spend £50 to £100 a year, and astonishingly that 18% gave the most popular answer!
It’s safe to say I am guilty of the charge. It just seems like I never have enough clothes or as most of us like to squeal “I have nothing to wear” – when our wardrobes are gushing with denim, leather, suede, and in my case sequins, even feathers! Some of my clothes even still have tags on them.
My hunch is that way more than 1% spend that much on clothes, and that way less than 18% spend that little. Almost every woman I know admits to being more or less addicted to clothes, so the Statista interviewees are probably in denial about the fact that they are addicted to shopping and spend ridiculous amounts of cash gratifying their habit.
Despite the fact that I’m currently drowning beneath a clothing tsunami I found myself this weekend looking online for a cheeky black dress to wear to an all black party. It was at that moment that I had to own up to having a shopping addiction – because I have several black dresses in my chaotic wardrobe already! I even remember one in particular that I stumbled upon recently and liked so much that I said to myself “I must wear that the next time I get the chance.” Why is this? It’s because the condition of clothes addiction means that if you (a) have an occasion to attend and (b) happen to find yourself near a clothes store, you enter a kind of trance, and cannot resist buying at least something, be it that little black number, or a dazzling lace jumpsuit embellished with beads and sequins. According to a 2018 survey conducted by Statista – the statistics portal for market media - less than one percent of respondents admitted
Given that I have so many items of clothing, I find myself partaking in the good old spring clear out. Out with old and in with the new. Or should I say out with the almost new and in with the even newer? But when clearing out, what do most people do with their unwanted items? For example do you recycle whenever you can? Or are you guilty of chucking laddered tights in the bin, when if you bothered to take the time you could cut the legs off them to make an undergarment, or alternatively transform them into an elegant turban headwrap? And why chuck that bubbly fleece away when with a bit of effort you could shave the bubbles off with a shaving stick? Finding ways to recycle your clothes would mean less goes to landfill – and last year the UK sent 235 million items of clothing to landfill! And it’s not just throwing away that is bad for the environment. Never mind that hole in your tights - making those clothes that you chuck
away is helping make a hole in that ozone layer! In 2016 Britons bought 1.13 million tonnes of clothing, which generated a total amount of 26.2 million tonnes of CO2. But let’s talk some more about wastefulness. There are so many people in the world who need our old clothes, which is why I choose to send my clothes over to Africa directly. My sister and I share the same addiction, so every year we pile our old clothes into a big plastic drum to ship out to Sierra Leone where they are distributed to young girls and boys. Growing up, my parents never liked to throw things away so we don’t like to either. The shipment takes about a month to land in Freetown and is distributed amongst those who need it either by us if we have gone over for a visit, or by members of the family who live there. So how should you get rid of your old clothes? There are several alternatives to dumping them in the trash. You can recycle them by packing them in black bags and dropping them off at your local charity shop. There are also recycling bins in every borough especially for clothes and textiles. As a Hackney resident I have access to 80 recycling bins for clothes that will be donated to charities such as Textile Reuse and International Development (TRAID), and Islamic Relief. I don’t know about you but it’s much more satisfying to know my clothes are being appreciated by someone elsewhere than just going to waste. And if you think you’d find it hard to cram that beloved dress through the slot in an ugly recycling bin, you can instead hand it over the counter delicately at the place you love most – a clothes shop! This is because stores like H&M accept any unwanted clothes, of any brand, and in any condition, and will give you a £5 voucher to use towards your next purchase. All the clothes they collect are recycled in some way, with zero per cent going to landfill. Remember - one man’s waste is another man’s treasure, so please pass old those clothes on.
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LO VE F OOD , HATE W AS TE
J OURN ALIS T: LUC AS RIBE IRO DOS S A N TO S
SAMUEL PINCHES 24 Anthropocene
A Modest (Lego) Proposal Everything is awesome, everything is cool when you are part of the team. Did you know that around 795 million of the people who live in this world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life? That’s about one in nine people on Earth. The vast majority of the world’s hungry live in developing countries, in which 12.9 percent of the population is undernourished. Did you also know that potatoes, bread and milk are the foods that are most often chucked away? Every day British households throw away around 5.8 million potatoes; 24 million slices of bread; and 5.8 million glasses of milk! That is £37 million worth of food wasted - every day! So, I have a suggestion for a way to replace these products that we then throw away with a product that will never go to waste. Why? Because the food I have in mind, if you did not want it, could be used for something else. Have you heard of krill? If not then you should have. They are like extremely tiny shrimps and our oceans are full of them. They are almost at the bottom of the food chain, and just one species in just the Southern Ocean makes up an estimated biomass of 379,000,000 tonnes. And they are also very nutritious. So, my modest proposal is that we farm krill to eat – which I know has been suggested before – but that we also then mould them in to the form of Lego bricks! Tiny Lego bricks that can be made into whatever we want.
Don’t fancy eating a boring loaf of bread? Then create a pizza or whatever you like! Kids will love it too! Having trouble getting your kids to eat their greens? With all food in the shape of Lego, you could create an edible robot for your kids to eat – if that’s what they wanted. Lego food would be economic, waste free and fun for the whole family. But this krill Lego food solves more than starvation. Instead of sending your Lego plate scrapings off to the dump, these useful blocks could be used to build shelters for the homeless, either at home or in disaster zones. As I’m sure someone once said: “You can’t build a house with bread and potatoes.” Why? Because they would rot before you got the roof on! But with Lego food you can! And there’s another benefit to my very modest proposal. It would finally rid the world of the curse of real Lego, which is made of plastic, and which according to one site I looked at “will not decompose even after 100,000 years.” According to another site I looked at 36000 Lego bricks are created every minute! That’s 2.16 million every hour and 19 billion every year! So it’s time to put an end to this plastic Lego madness and save the world with krill Lego food! Come on everybody and let’s make this happen. We are in this together. Because never forget: Everything is awesome, everything is cool when you are part of the team.
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T HE E XODUS
NICK HRISTEV
Caption: W h y a m I n o t w e l c o m e ?
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Caption: I pay taxes too
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Caption: I am not stea l i n g y o u r j o b s
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Caption: Citizens of the world
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J O URN ALIS T: J O RDA N J ON E S UR BAN ISATI ON
KAYLEIGH BALL 32 Anthropocene
The Anthropocene Era. Man has agency over the Earth. Our civilisations spawn villages, then towns, then cities. The Earth drowns beneath concrete and stone. Our high-rise megalomania throws shadows over the Earth and the world turns grey. But it’s not all gloom and doom. Cities can be green too. In fact London is one of the greenest cities in the world, and most of that green space is open to the public. In fact according to Greenspace Information for Greater London (GiGL) around 42% of Greater London can be described as public open space, made up of everything from parks and gardens (5.83% of that 42%), and cemeteries and churchyards (0.86%). Other than what is called “other urban fringe” (8.05%) the most space is given over to outdoor sports facilities (6.76%) And the good news is that many activists are striving to make London even greener. For example the London Friends of Green Spaces Network (LFGN) supports and encourages local Friends Groups, whose aim is to ensure that parks and green spaces are adequately resourced. Parks for London is an independent charity that works with people to “manage, maintain and enjoy” parks in order to keep them “thriving, accessible, safe and beautiful places”. And these are just two examples of the groups working just in London! There are also others throughout the country. For example there are 46 Wildlife Trusts around the UK, with websites that support each wildlife area. The London Wildlife Trust for
example supports the care of over 37 of London’s wild spaces, and provides fact files on the abundance of species that live successfully in the capital. On its ‘London Species Spotlight’ website page you can even find the rare Peregrine Falcon, as well as a list of the London grasslands and wetlands where you can find the Skylark: Wimbledon Common, Yeading Brook Meadows, Richmond Park and Rainham Marshes. There are many benefits to promoting the protection and creation of green spaces within cities and other communities. Obviously these green spaces improve the air quality through increased absorption of pollutants in the air such as carbon monoxide. But there are also physical and mental benefits for humans. Studies conducted by the City of London have shown that green spaces and parks lower obesity and promote better cardiovascular and respiratory health. Other studies have linked green spaces to reduced levels of stress, and mental fatigue, and there is evidence that children show enhanced cognitive and motor skills when given access to green spaces to play in. Social benefits of urban green spaces include greater community cohesion and social interaction. Or to put it less technically people also use parks to make love, propose marriage or share their first date. And sometimes, sadly, they might also go there to break up. And when they’ve broken up they might then go to the park to be alone, because open spaces also become a place of refuge and escape for humans.
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T IME A N D MAT T E R
CRISTIAN VATAVU
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P H OTOGR A P H ER S
Oliver Luff Instagram: luffphotos Sean Kankam Instagram: kkphotography13 Chloee Allen www.cavaphotography.com Instagram: cavaphotography Shanice Attram Instagram: shanicephotography2019 Samuel Pinches Instagram: sam_pinches Dominika Goraus Instagram: chaotic_nika Nick Hristev Instagram: nickhristevv Kayleigh Ball Instagram: kayleighrball
J OU R NA L IS T S
Michelle Harris
E NQU I RI ES
Minna Kantonen School of Architecture and Visual Arts University of East London Docklands Campus London E16 2RD m.kantonen@uel.ac.uk
GR AP H IC D ESI GN
Cristian Vatavu Instagram: jay.bearcub
Joe Verity University of East London Joeverity@aol.com Instagram: joeverity_
CONTRIBUTORS
Anne Barandiaran www.bananne.com Instagram: bananne_ph
Lucas Ribeiro Dos Santos Rachel Deane Simche Williams Jordan Jones
The views expressed in Antropocene are those of the respective contributors. All right reserved 2020. Š University of East London 39
