extinction the world without us thomas gauthier davide galandini rosie barnes adam reynolds gaëtan chevrier pietro motisi Cristian Ordóñez francesco merlini alessio pellicoro shanna merolA
gian marco sanna daniel kariko MICHELE VITTORI GEORG KATSTALLER SÉBASTIEN ARRIGHI MADELENE CASS NICOLA AVANZINELLI Leslie Hakim-Dowek HANS WILSCHUT FLEUR JAKOBS
ROBERTO VITO D’AMICO Charles BouchaïB ANDREA BUZZICHELLI STEFANIA ORFANIDOU STEVE DAVIS ELBA COLLECTIVE LORENZO LEONE SARA NICOMEDI DAWN ROE GIOVANNI PRESUTTI
“Prometheus’s triumph has been all too overwhelming.” – Günther Anders, On Promethean Shame
thomas gauthier davide galandini rosie barnes adam reynolds gaëtan chevrier pietro motisi Cristian Ordóñez francesco merlini alessio pellicoro shanna merolA gianmarco sanna daniel kariko MICHELE VITTORI GEORG KATSTALLER SÉBASTIEN ARRIGHI MADELENE CASS NICOLA AVANZINELLI Leslie Hakim-Dowek HANS WILDSCHUT FLEUR JAKOBS ROBERTO VITO D’AMICO Charles BouchaïB ANDREA BUZZICHELLI STEFANIA ORFANIDOU STEVE DAVIS ELBA COLLECTIVE LORENZO LEONE SARA NICOMEDI DAWN ROE GIOVANNI PRESUTTI
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04
Seules les étoiles resteront
THOMAS GAUTHIER
A few months ago, I went for several days in the Jura region in France. Having brought with me Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, a book by David Treuer addressing the theme of the Native Americans, I then began to think of these people. While walking in the mountains, I had this strange feeling that the Native Americans were hidden in these mountains and could arise from nowhere. That I could find traces of their passages. By the biggest coincidence, my camera started to make images with a strange rendering. The idea then came to me to work on a series addressing the notion of the dream. This series is visual poetry, a photographic and contemplative narration including autobiographical elements. It does not address a subject in the classical sense of the term. I put in pictures my feelings. In this work I approach the notions of place and time. Timelessness is a key element of the series. Getting lost in time and space is a feeling that I appreciate. The series sails between dream and reality. The real is the raw material with which I create a mystery. I mix everyday banality with intriguing images to build a personal work that gives the viewer the freedom to make their own opinion. I approach the theme of extinction with the notion of the imaginary since the Native Americans peoples have not disappeared.Â
gauthierphotographie.com
12
Vinewood
DAVIDE GALANDINI
Vinewood Project is laboratory of research on our perception of landscape and it aims to narrow the existing gap between what is real and what is distorted mythology in the eye of the reader. A visual tool which arises as a necessary reaction to the catastrophe which characterizes the geography of everyday, winking in its olderly geometry, even when it is exploited and poisoned. Soil consumption, mining industry, intensive and monocratic agricolture; this sort of white noise spreads unabated forever changing our relationship with nature and environment. Therefore change the way of seeing the world through a daily practice of research and artistic intervention.
davidegalandini.it
20
A Peculiar and Dangerous Convenience
ROSIE BARNES
I began this work over 20 years ago whilst studying at the University of Brighton. The work examines - using everyday, commonly seen examples the idea of human ascendancy over the natural world – our need to manage, control and contain it. I have continued to add to the project. I originally called the series ‘Human Nature’ and thought of it as ‘a ‘tragi-comedic’ study of our relationship with the natural world’. However, as the evidence mounts and with it our increased understanding of what is happening to the planet and our impact upon it, has made me see it as something much darker. And it feels more relevant than ever. Eco-anxiety is a recognised and increasingly common condition. The existential fear of climate breakdown and our own mortality the end of the world, the world that we have created. And as the evidence is laid bare, it is a very uncomfortable realisation. We can stuff a dead animal, put it in a box, we can build dams, we can use nature as camouflage. But we have exploited and abused it for our own convenience, sanitizing, packaging and perfecting it to our needs and desires. These everyday details remind us, as we stare out over the precipice with an increasing sense of unease and fear, that we’ve overlooked the natural balance of things, the natural order. We’re not in control at all. We’ve been kidding ourselves all along.
rosiebarnes.com
28
No Lone Zone
ADAM REYNOLDS
At the height of the Cold War, the United States deployed thousands of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) in a network of underground complexes across the American landscape. These nuclear weapons made up one part of America’s vast deterrent force as it faced off against its ideological rival, the Soviet Union, until its collapse in 1992. And as the Cold War itself has faded from memory, so too have the lessons and fears these weapons once elicited in the general public. Yet the issue of unchecked nuclear proliferation has returned that fear to the forefront. With much of America’s Cold War-era nuclear arsenal deactivated and dismantled today, there are a growing number of former missile sites whose mission is to preserve the history and memory of the period. These frozen time capsules are open to the public, catering to an array of nostalgic “nuclear tourists.” As “Shrines to an Armageddon”, they preserve the dramatic vestiges of a power that can destroy the world. The sites stand sentinel as potent reminders of American military might, but also serve as a cautionary tale for future generations. Two such sites, the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site in South Dakota and the Titan Missile Museum in Arizona, are the only remaining ICBM sites in the United States that not only allow visitors into the underground launch control center, but also to come face to face with a (nonfunctioning) intercontinental ballistic missile as well. The project’s title refers to the Air Force’s mandatory two-person buddy system in place at all ICBM sites. This applied both to the on-duty officers on 24-hour alert in the launch control center and to the work crews tasked with maintaining the missiles. The policy was intended as a safety precaution and as a safeguard against potential sabotage. The images pair America’s most prolific ICBM (the Minuteman II) with its most powerful (the Titan II) and offer a calculated look at the nuts and bolts of Mutually Assured Destruction, the mad logic behind nuclear deterrence.
adamreynoldsphotography.com
36
À l’origine
Gaëtan Chevrier
The Earth is this anthropized planet we share and whose future livability we must ensure. The rise of so-called natural disasters, hurricanes, cyclones, tsunamis, earthquakes, remind us of the vulnerability of inhabited spaces, and of the interdependence of human and non-human beings living there. Therefore planetary urbanization choices are paramout. Decisions to build in the most fragile areas - behind dikes, below sea level, on geological faults which are most often destroyed, remind us of the limits of the act of building. And these decisions are those that will or will not impact our relationships with the built environment.In this regard, we note today the recurrent choice to focus on improving techniques and engineering to protect ourselves from this planet, rather than to evolve towards strategies for a dwelling that has been conceived as fragile. Hong Kong tells us one of those stories of conquest. The British colonists who approached the shores of this coast described a bare rock with steep slopes. This mythical story is well known, it is the story of the one who arrives and “discovers” a land without history, that “gives itself” to colonization. The fact remains that British colonization is sporadic, there are only a few buildings on the hills and along the shores. An image that is totally obsolete today for those who know Hong Kong, like many, from its stereotypical image of gigantic towers in front of steep mountains, covered with dense forests. Hong Kong intrigues architects and urban planners with the huge contradictions that shape the experience of this city. The incessant artificial embankments are carried out at the same time as the sanctuary of hectares of nature, in the same remoteness of this environment. The obligation to build high, due to constraints of available surface and in order to appear as a world-class metropolis, creates a singular urban experience, exotic for the Western pedestrian: that of the vertical street. The ultra-density of the city is denounced as an example of unsustainable development yet is also valued as a laboratory of the extreme compactness of the living space. But the recent movements of demand from civil society for participation in the definition of major projects are the main driving force for change in the future of the city. (text : Anne Bossé / architect, doctor of geography, researcher of CRENAU.)
gaetanchevrier.com
44
Sicilia Fantasma
PIETRO MOTISI
The photographs in this body of work titled Sicilia Fantasma, which literally means “Ghost Sicily” represents a collection of personal visions about Sicily, gathered between 2012 and 2018. In an attempt to represent the Land through a series of landscapes, the desire is to generate a relationship between the observer and the represented spaces which stimulates a delving beyond the surface of the ‘scape’. In this way establishing a critical point of reflection on who we are in relation to the characteristics of our spaces and our time. The critique is expressed as a dialectical knot, rather than an assumption; elements of concern more than a complaint, useful to gather questions and political thoughts. As David Goldblatt said, «Events in themselves are not so much interesting to me as the conditions that led to the events», in that way this work represents something like a mirror, which reflects on belonging to a land - an exercise in reading space and that which occurs in it, to better understand and reposition our actions, feelings, relationships and responsibilities toward the land, so ourselves.
pietromotisi.it
52
We are constantly on trial
Cristian Ordóùez
Into the wind, the wild and beyond. Following nature, light, and traces. An ongoing body of work created while following the traditional road-trip experience through the American Landscape. Understanding a landscape in flux, the traces humans leave behind, the way mankind has shaped the land and how nature takes over the complex situations our species produce. Curious of the transitional reality of current times, the risks of the environment, and the rise and fall of the human condition. This work does not focus primarily on a political environmental view of the land, but it rather studies the perception of the vast scenery, emptiness, history, peripheries and apparent relationship with the land that surrounded us throughout the journey.
cristianordonez.com
60
The Flood
FRANCESCO MERLINI
Late on 13 June 2015 heavy rainfalls hit Tbilisi and the nearby areas. When people woke up in the morning 19 people would be dead, many families made homeless, a zoo destroyed and a city in shock. A landslide was released above the village of Akhaldaba, about 20 km southwest of Tbilisi. The landslide, carrying 1 million m3 of land, mud, and trees, moved down into Tbilisi and dammed up the Vere river at two points, first at a 10m wide channel at Tamarashvili Street and then at a channel under Heroes’s Square, a major traffic hub. The resulting flood inflicted severe damage especially on the Tbilisi Zoo; The city briefly became a wilderness full of dangerous beasts. The zoo lost more than 300 animals, nearly half of its inhabitants: the majority were killed by flooding. Several surviving inhabitants of the zoo—a hippopotamus, big cats, wolves, bears, and hyenas—escaped from destroyed pens and cages to the streets of Tbilisi and a police unit was employed to round them up. Some were killed, others were recaptured and brought back to the zoo. The media ran footage showing the hippopotamus making its way to flooded Heroes’ Square, one of Tbilisi’s major roadway hubs, where it was subdued with a tranquilizer dart. On 17 June a white tiger remaining on the loose attacked and mortally wounded a man in a storehouse near the zoo. The animal was eventually shot dead by the police. An African penguin was found at the Red Bridge border crossing with Azerbaijan, having swum some 60 km south from Tbilisi. Many Georgians condemned the foreign media’s focus on the zoo and their indifference to the stories of the human victims. Catholicos Patriarch Ilia II, an influential head of the Georgian Orthodox Church, in his Sunday sermon, blamed the floods on the ’sin’ of the former Communist regime which, he said, built the zoo in its current location using the money raised from destroying churches and melting down their bells. The causes of such a disaster, more realistically, can be found in the lack of water holding capacity along the rivers course due to deforestation, Soviet-era infrastructure, poor maintenance, weak planning controls and extensive and often illegal development that impacted the riverbed. This project brought me to photograph the zoo and the animals that survived, the place where the new park will be built, the valley where Vere river flows, the spot where the landslide originated and some of the places where the topic of old infrastructures and of illegal residential development are more evident. Even if some years have passed and most of the consequences of the flood are no more visible, I have come across landscapes that suggest that some kind of catastrophe has just happened. Consequently I decided to create a narration that blends together a documentary account of the tragedy’s aftermath and a visual reflection on the present Georgian panorama.
francescomerlini.com
68
The other Red Desert, a place of ‘Microworlds’
ALESSIO PELLICORO
A project that aims to examine those so-called microworlds born on the margins of a very complex urban system and which, over time, have assumed the unlikely forms of autonomous reality and detached from the central city pole, Taranto. Marginal peripheral districts (such as ‘Paolo VI, Tamburi, Salinella’) which constitute the ‘internal suburbs’ and which are distributed as ‘urban filaments’ in industrial areas. A landscape contaminated by the processes of industrial expansion, as well as urban/residential of a popular type... A clear example of Shrinking City, a city in serious demographic contraction: a phenomenon that initially spread in the United States and caused by the sudden conversion of the ‘industrial’ reality to ‘post-industrial’ (examples are Saint Louis in Missouri; Youngstown, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Toledo in Ohio; Pittsburg in Pennsylvania; Detroit in Michigan). The case of Taranto appears as a wrong total systemic conversion that has not yet fully occurred due to the various industrial realities present, active and inactive, which have always represented an ecological threat to the landscape and above all to the quality of life of the inhabitant forced to live too close to them.
instagram.com/a_pellicoro
76
We All Live Downwind
Shanna Merola
The images in We All Live Downwind are culled from daily headlines – inspired by both global and grassroots struggles against the forces of privatization in the face of disaster capitalism. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein writes about the free market driven exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries saying, “the original disaster—the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown, the war, the tsunami, the hurricane — puts the entire population into a state of collective shock”. The scenes in We All Live Downwind, have been carved out of dystopian landscapes in the aftermath of these events. On the surface, rubble hints at layers of oil and shale, cracked and bubbling from the earth below. Rising from another mound, rows of empty mobile homes bake beneath the summer sun. The bust of small towns left dry in the aftermath of supply and demand. In this place, only fragments of people remain, their mechanical gestures left tending to the chaos on auto. Reduced to survival, their struggle against an increasingly hostile environment goes unnoticed. Beyond the upheaval of production a bending highway promises never ending expansion - and that low rumble you hear to the west is getting louder.
shannamerola.virb.com
84
Malagrotta
GIAN MARCO SANNA
The Malagrotta Dump is the main long-term storage site for undifferentiated urban solid waste from the city of Rome. It is located in the western suburbs of the city, in the estate of Malagrotta. The name derives from the Latin Mola Rupta (“broken wheel”), a name originated by a broken grinding wheel on the nearby stream Rio Galeria. According to some, the largest landfill in Europe. 240 hectares, between 4500 and 5000 tons of waste were dumped every day. In 2013, Italy was denounced at the European Court of Justice by the European Environment Committee as part of the waste discharged at the landfill did not undergo the biological treatment (MBT) required by the European regulations to reduce the volumetric consistency of waste, and facilitate their possible recovery. On January 9, 2014, the NOE (ecological department of carabinieri), commanded by Sergio De Caprio, known as “Ultimo” (“The Last”), stops 7 people. Among others the owner of the dump Manlio Cerroni, know as “Re della monnezza” (“the king of garbage”) and the former president of the Lazio region Bruno Landi. Since its closure the situation has not improved. Abandoned waste of all kinds are still visible in the areas surrounding the landfill. Malagrotta is black water flows, worn tires, rubbles, abandoned cars, dead palms, ashes. A wounded ground. In the night the air is filled with a thick cloud of smoke and stench. It’s the city of snow.
gianmarcosanna.com
92
Suburban Symbiosis Silent Extinction
DANIEL KARIKO
This long-term project is an investigation of our relationship to our surrounding landscape through micro images of locally found insects and other arthropods. My images utilize the combination of Scanning Electron Microscope and optical Stereo Microscope, in order to achieve a “portrait�-like effect inspired by the tradition of 17th Century Dutch Masters. Most of the species of insects are likely to disappear before they are even discovered and described by entomologists. Our planet is a home for to an estimated five, perhaps ten million different kinds of insects, not including other arthropods. Most scientists agree that there are more undiscovered species than identified ones so far. It is estimated that they represent 80 percent of all the species in the world. And yet, in spite of their numbers and variety, they are vanishing at an alarming rate. From newsworthy bee colony collapses to recent noticeable absence of dead insects on our windshields, some species fell by 75% to 90% in the last 20 years. As they are not charismatic megafauna, theirs is a silent extinction. An elimination from the natural record that is invisible to an average person, and caused by habitat loss, pesticides, herbicides, and climate change. These little (and sometimes not so little) invaders are natural product of our own occupation of their habitat. As we keep expanding our subdivisions to the outskirts of towns, we inhabit recently altered environments. This anthropomorphic presentation of our closest, often invisible, co-habitants in a humorous, quasi-scientific way, is an invitation to consider the evidence of the human impact on the landscape as we constantly redraw boundaries between us and the natural environment.
danielkariko.com
100
Walking
MICHELE VITTORI
In the contemporary world, the imbalances in the relationship between man and Nature are beginning to have devastating effects. In wildness is the salvation of the world, wrote H.D. Thoreau, there is, therefore, an urgent need to rediscover a new ecological consciousness in response to the anthropocentric vision that has designed modernity. The series, still in progress, is a personal visual diary of a “traversing� of the central Italian Apennines between the territories of Umbria, Abruzzo, Lazio, and Marche. Walking and crossing territories as a method to regain the true meaning of nature, and to rethink man and the environment as a single complex organism.
michelevittori.com
108
‘84
Georg Katstaller
Mount Igman, near Sarajevo, was one of the sports venues in the Winter Olympics ’84 in Ex-Yugoslavia. Eight years later, it became a deadly war zone during the siege of Sarajevo (1992-1996). It seems, as strange as it sounds, that war and the Olympic games have something in common. Partially because war creates a sense of unity in the face of a collective threat. Just like the Olympic games, it binds people together – not just the army engaged in battle, but the whole community. However, games do not contribute to humans extinction, wars do. Athletes from different parts of the world arrived at the Olympic hotel on the mount, Igman, to participate in peaceful competition. Eight years later soldiers were hiding in its ruins, searching for cover from artillery shells. Mount Igman symbolizes a fragile line between war and peace. The fact that so many societies all over the world fail to stop repeating history, by continuing to engage in massive violent conflicts, shows us that mankind lives in a loop it can’t escape.
georgkatstaller.com
116
Shivers
SÉBASTIEN ARRIGHI
Shivers is a series of landscape fragments that deal with scenes and objects captured in the truth of their apparitions. National Park, wasteland, rare specimens, and details representative of the synthetic reality that emanates from many occupied territories. This familiarity reveals here a few traces, shocks, sounds and expenditure of energy that have charged the texture of the landscape, as would the shiver do, passing through once body in the dark.
sebastienarrighi.com
124
How lonely, to be a marsh
MADELENE CASS
Salt is in our blood. Fundamental to human life, for millennia we have sought out salt. One of the most endangered ecosystems on the Great Plains are 1,000 acres of inland saline wetland made from Mesozoic-era salt deposits in southeastern Nebraska (in the midwest of the United States). The water there is nearly as salty as the ocean. The wetlands once numbered between 16,000 and 60,000 acres (it seems to be debated) – but now they have almost completely been erased. As the city of Lincoln expands, the threats to wildlife and wetlands multiply. Much of this habitat has been degraded or destroyed by drainage from surrounding farms, and the growth of the city. Many of the acres of marsh have been turned into landfills and car lots, and housing developments - houses that are sitting seemingly empty and unsold. Few people among the local population seem to be aware of the wetlands, and even fewer have visited them, despite existing a just few miles from downtown Lincoln. Their biological importance is often overlooked and ignored by the historically agricultural community. The abundant mud flats of the saline wetlands are rich with a variety of wildlife. It’s common to see a pair of nesting bald eagles, a coyote or red foxes. It is more difficult to spot the Salt Creek tiger beetle - a critically endangered subspecies that is endemic to the wetlands. The beetle is considered a bio-indicator species, its presence signaling the existence of a healthy saline wetland. This body of work is a personification of place, an emotional reverie on a salt marsh near Lincoln, Nebraska. It is an attempt to engender an elusive place not readily known – at once both heartfelt and heartbroken. how lonely to be a marsh consists of original poetry and photography, including botanical and zoological specimens, and early 1900s glass plate photographs and journal excerpts by pioneering prairie ecologist Frank Shoemaker (1875–1948). He is the namesake for the main section of the saline wetlands in Lancaster County – Frank Shoemaker Marsh. This ecological story, like so many others, is one of destruction, exploitation, and misunderstanding. Cass’ work calls to mind an issue that is not just about the salt marshes or wildlife but how people in the Midwest and the rest of America view the role of protecting irreplaceable land. Protections for endangered species as a whole are being weakened by the Trump administration. Additionally, a recently proposed development nearby would almost certainly spell disaster for the tiger beetle and many other species. If we are to save critical habitat, it must be placed in a new context, one in which our awareness of it and relationship to it is based on the personal and poetic rather than the profitable & recreational.
madelinecass.com
132
The precipice
NICOLA AVANZINELLI
Imagine to take your subconscious and immerse it under the water. Suspend your breath. Suspend the wind. This is where my mind goes when I see Avanzinelli’s work. - Federica Chiocchetti, Photocaptionist - After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara in 2006, I currently live and work in Paris. My research explores the emergence of an apnoeic subconscious within memory in everyday life and how it relates with momentary lapses of intimacy. I work with images and texts through a non-linear and fragmented sequence of visual excerpts from daily life. Like a short-circuit they navigate my mind along an unintended path, often producing dystopian associations. I am interested in how collective and personal memory co-exist within an individual’s mind, at times peacefully blending, at others fighting. The theme of your open call prompted me to question the position and role of the artist in relation to what we tend to call ‘world’. What is the role of the artist when the ‘world’ is facing such an urgent issue and it appears already too late to invert our descent into the ‘eco-inferno’? Questioning the hopelessness of art in changing dangerous tendencies or raising awareness is what preoccupies me. There seems to be a paradox between human extinction and the yearning to document it. Document it for whom if there is no future? It is for me also a story of the extinction of human effort to avoid the end. We could call it ‘collective suicide’. The precipice The instant right before was clear and all hopes were dashed. The thud and the gray deafened the air. It’s the time when the light disappears. Everyone was aware. The breath started to decompose.
instagram.com/nicola.avanzinelli
140
Twilight island
Leslie Hakim-Dowek
Twilight island is a poetic contemplation of a time spent on a volcanic island. This book resonates with a subtext of several themes and thresholds. A succession of vistas from volcanic craters to desert plateaux is juxtaposed with landmarks of memory and recreational spaces where spectacles are set to unfold in a cycle of endless tourism. Sometimes the themes are polarised such as the vast wilderness we live in and the coming of age of two girls, my twin daughters; an earthly stage where generational rites and rituals have come into being but to which, we remain largely oblivious. In a culture terminally ill with amnesia, in which temporal boundaries have weakened, an axis is drawn between the earthly transformations over millennia which are laid bare on this island and our compulsive stream of capture. This book is an attempt to provide a brief anchoring of an ever-transitory present within the inherent silence and stillness of a photograph.
lesliehakimdowek.com
148
The World In One Place
HANS WILSCHUT
The World in One Place The area that is currently known as the Central Business District has been the central area of Johannesburg nearly since its inception. Its central location in the city as well as careful planning led to it to be chosen as the best location for a mix of residential and commercial development, especially during the economically prosperous 1960s and 1970s. Many large constructions were completed in this period, such as the Carlton Centre, which is still the tallest building in Africa. Under the apartheid, the Central Business District was classified as a whites-only area, meaning that black people were only allowed to work and shop there, but could not live there. It completely changed when the race segregation system ended in 1990. In the post apartheid time the CBD became more accessible for non white groups for both living and working. Unfortunately a crime wave swept through the city and many businesses and people fled from areas such as Braamfontein, Hillbrow, and Yeoville for more secured houses or offices in the Northern Suburbs of Johannesburg. It was the start of the richest mile in Africa, the city of Sandton. By the late 1990s, the Central Business District became a no-go zone and a virtual ghost town. All its former glory was lost, and the city was shattered by the loss of the Carlton Hotel. It was in 2008 when I started to photograph the urban decay in the city of J’oburg and since then I came back for substential working periods. Evicted buildings re-occupied by illegal residents became the rotten teeth in the citylandscape. For more then 10 years I have been trying to understand such lack of human care that I saw in these urban environments all over the city. 15 years of severe economical and social problems such as poverty, housing, drugabuse and immigration had left its marks on the health of Johannesburg. Gentrification slightly changed some lower suburbs but the contrasts in the Central Business District only relocated. To me the theme of human extinction is applicable the condition humaine of Johannesburg.
hanswilschut.com
156
Stripped of the earth
FLeUR JAKOBS
Having grown up with nature as a self-evident factor that was always present in my life, I find it strange to notice that the meaning of the concept of nature is changing. In our time, the most unthinkable problems can be tackled with technology and science. But because we have these possibilities, we use it to arrange our environment to our own taste. This of course also applies to nature. The nature that we control and create no longer needs earth to survive, just us. And the nature that’s out there, that does need soil to survive, is limited by us because we keep on restricting the space it needs to grow. I adopt the modern idea that everything is manufacturable. So I create my own scientific experiments. In these experiments I emphasize on the aspects of nature that we seemingly all want to get rid of: the imperfections. I take control of specific pieces of nature and determine what happens to it. Self-invented scientific experiments merge with the actual image of the treatment of nature under artificial conditions. This might make it hard to distinguish between what is being investigated in a laboratory and what is being done in my living room. An investigation into our current view of nature: can you still speak of nature if there is so much human influence?
fleurjakobs.nl
164
Unmanned Pigeons
ROBERTO VITO D’AMICO
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is the official name of the vehicles well known as drones. Located in the south-east of Niscemi, a town of thirty thousand inhabitants on the plateau between the Erei and Iblei mountains, near Caltanissetta, the US military base for radio telecommunications Naval Radio Transmitter Facility (NRTF) rises into the Sughereta Natural Reserve. Inside the base has been recently activated the Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) a system that interfaces with all the robotic military devices, including drones. The electromagnetic field produced by the base is perceptible beyond a radius of 100 km, and there are numerous scientific studies that are working on the demonstration of the impact of electromagnetism on birdlife. In particular, groups of Sicilian environmentalists are sure that the electromagnetic field produced by the NRTF base as well as the MUOS are diverting the migratory flow of birds, which have always flown over those areas of Sicily. Unmanned Pigeons introduces itself into this relationship between telecommunications military base, electromagnetic waves and bird migrations with the aim of visualization of these invisible effects that the massive US militarization in Sicily causes on birdlife.
instagram.com/roberto_damico
172
La Pennétrie
Charles BouchaïB
Before hydroelectricity development and tourism activities, Maurienne territories were very early exploited. Roads of the Mont-Cenis have crossed the Alps since Hannibal times. Over the years, railroad pioneers experienced different tracks in that area. Today a new passage is being dug, instrument of flows economy and completion of an old ambition. The drilling of the LyonTurin tunnel crystallizes the relationship with time disparities. A coveted time, whose incompressibility tries to be abolished by an obstinate search for speed. This is a Trans-European essential link for some while its legitimacy is also reprobated. As ephemeral compromise between anthropic interests and natural constraints, landscapes are also the support of economic convulsions and become -aleasacapes-, containing evidences of a past of future threat... To what extent can one consider that technique makes the world more or less fit to live in? Is there any disconnection between economic time and natural human timeframe ? What is the threshold making a resilient environment permanently modified and hostile for human? Without offering direct answers, these issues are covered throughout this series. The image approaches vary from poetic evocation to documentary investigation.
charlesbouchaib.com
180
Fragile
ANDREA BUZZICHELLI
Cecina is a small river. Nowadays it is threatened, as much of its lands, by the ‘dominant steam’ strategy - the geothermal science. However, the river is a source of life for many organisms that risk of being forgotten. This is why Andrea Buzzichelli chose to illustrate the whole life cycle of frogs through his pictures. Together with his two kids, he decided to picture their evolution, the gradual opening of life, the wonder of a slow transformation from tadpoles to small amphibians. His photos driven by the observation of nature reveal the amazement for something universal. A quest that goes back to our own origins.
andreabuzzichelli.it
188
Cache
Stefania Orfanidou
Cache in computing refers to the hardware or software component that stores data so that future requests can be served faster. It is a place where memory is kept well-hidden from the eye of the user, yet it is all the time present and ready to be recalled. In this project, I delve into the state of semiconsciousness, by examining those inexplicable fragments of memory that emerge at unexpected moments, when for a split second the perception of the present is getting lost. I collect these fragments, that linger in the in-between of imagination and reality and I attempt to recompose them. The result could be described as a ‘residual’ archive, the creation of a new memory in which familiar images that were suppressed in the subconscious - either violently due to trauma or just because they were considered of less importance - are being recalled back. The process involves layered transitions of consciousness, with the aim to reach the most inaccessible data of the mind, at the place where a personal redemption might be hidden.
stefaniaorfanidou.com
196
The Western Lands
SteVE DAVIS
Beauty can lurk in strange places, and I find myself drawn to landscapes which suggest ambiguity, emptiness, and the spiritually untidy. To me, they resonate as backdrops to stories and dreams—vague suggestions of the earth as a temporary gesture. They are as close to nowhere as I can get.
davis.photo
204
Frozen Rooms
Elba collective
What happens is that even building take a long winter’s nap (go on hibernation), we are dealing with several towns which fall asleep for a considerable amount of time waiting to be awakened by the arrival of the tourists, the firsts quieter and most shy than the intrusive last ones. A forced on and off extinction, which leaves entire buildings and structures suspended in time and space, cyclically, year by year, up to becomes a routine, made up of preservation rituals capable of making them unrecognizable when compared to the high season set. They are not abandoned but frozen, they are alive but moving extremely slowly, the architectural casing finally appears as it had been originally designed, they show up like two-dimensional sceneries due to the limitation of the human being interaction. We wanted to investigate this metamorphosis, which nothing can be done except waiting in silence, so we just sat down in this great waiting room and look. (Elba Collective: Elisa Florian + Barbara Modolo)
elisaflorian.com
212
A journey to Thekla and Moriana
LORENZO LEONE
Thekla and Moriana are two of the cities described by Italo Calvino in ‘The invisible cities’. The first one, a city in continuous construction, wrapped in an uninterrupted scaffolding. The second one, a two-dimensional city characterized by opposite faces, the first shining, presentable,’façade’; the other, the reverse, hidden, abandoned by aesthetic care. This series of photographs is intended to represent a hypothetical journey to these places through some of their infinite possible representations through images. A journey that can be undertaken with the meaning given by Marcel Proust in ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ according to which “The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is”. A journey that lends itself to two different interpretations of time. An ‘evolutionary’ and progressive marked by the appearance of nature until it prevails in parallel with the works of man. The other, instead, is characterized by the circular time of an interrupted cycle of construction, use, abandonment and reconstruction.
lorenzoleone.eu
220
Extinction-isn’t a good title
SARA NICOMEDI
We are currently experiencing the sixth mass extinction, two hundred species disappear every day, the last United Nations summit on climate change stated that we have eleven years left to avoid the catastrophe by keeping the global temperature rise below 2 degrees. Such awareness has led me to question my intention to become a mother in the present historical context; through this project I analyze myself as memories resurface and I reflect on the strength of life and on the deepest sense of existence. Extinction-isn’t a good title recounts three generations: that of my grandmother, who lived in conjunction with what is considered to have marked the beginning of the great acceleration of our era called the Anthropocene, than that of my parents and down until today. Through the use of representative images, self-portraits, documentary photos, archives and collages, I analyze the relationship that exists between the past and present, our actions today and their possible impact on future generations. I aim to emphasize this is the time to rebuilt awareness on our actual needs, what future we want on the Earth and how to act accordingly. Can we transform the current climate and social crisis into something useful to the restoration of empathy among human beings and hence allow ourselves to evolve on a spiritual and emotional level?
saranicomediphotography.com
228
Conditions for an Unfinished Work of Mourning: Wretched Yew
DAWN ROE
Conditions for an Unfinished Work of Mourning: Wretched Yew is the second sequence of an ongoing series using the process of recording via photography, film, video, and sound to draw upon the pathos embedded within sites of sorrow and distress while revealing moments of resilience. This phase of the project relates the taxus brevifolia genus of yew tree native to the Pacific Northwest – known for its healing properties, and as a symbol of death and regeneration – to my own experience in the region during a tumultuous time when the pervasive sight of clear cut hillsides served as the visual backdrop to personal struggles with addiction, depression, and loss. These adjacent recollections led me to consider the cultural and ecological legacy of this species as indicative of ongoing cycles of neglect. Though long revered by indigenous cultures, the Pacific Yew was primarily disregarded by foresters of the settler state as an insignificant understory component – both economically and environmentally – until it was discovered to generate a plant alkaloid highly effective as a chemotherapy drug. Though now synthetically produced, a government contract with a global, pharmaceutical company resulted in the decimation of much of the already sparse population of yew when harvesting of its bark occurred in the 1990s. Yet, due to its indestructible nature and ability to easily regenerate, isolated pockets of both old growth and more recently sprouted Pacific Yew continue to thrive as vital components of the ecosystem. During repeated trips to Oregon, a number of these trees were located. In conjunction with video recording, sun exposed images of and around the trunks, branches and leaves were produced over extended intervals. UVsensitive contact printing processes were incorporated as a primary image capture technique due to the prolonged exposure required by these methods. The resulting imprints archive and represent duration in a manner distinct from the moving image trace of the same instance, allowing for an examination of the space between record and document, referencing the simultaneous passage and persistence of time. As a straightforward yet precisely indexical camera-less form of transcription, the use of the photogram also serves as a deliberate nod to the DIY ethos of punk culture, connecting back to my formative years in Portland and the musicians who are collaborating on the soundtrack to the accompanying video work. Together, the individual project components serve as collective acknowledgement of the unsettled grief that permeates this mental and physical space, functioning as a set of discrete elegies apprehending the residue of dormant trauma by making visible that which endures.
dawnroe.com
228
Hello Dolly!
GIOVANNI PRESUTTI
The one represented in Hello Dolly is a near future in which humanity is lost and all that remains is a frightening doll. It wanders in an apocalyptic scenario of degradation and cement. The Earth is a pile of empty and abandoned buildings. Dolly is the metaphysical protagonist inspired by the anthropomorphic mannequins of Giorgio De Chirico. Her body is an empty form without a soul, a case full of vaguely human images, memories and sensations; an intellectual projection of man. Her anonymous plastic shapes make humanity’s sense of bewilderment even stronger, becoming a symbol of the consumerist era that has brought the world to its knees, to its void. Cinematic and literary suggestions are the basis of every image, in which the strong reference to the sci-fi settings of Philip Dick and following dystopian visions stand out. These are the symbols of consumerism. Stripped of their function, they become totems worshiped by an inanimate doll, and showing a cross-section of a future that is inexorably approaching.
giovannipresutti.com
extinction the world without us