Meanwhile, New York-based photographer Ismail Ferdous explores beach culture in Bangladesh, focusing specifically on Cox’s Bazar – the world’s longest natural beach and a place where Ferdous spent much time as a child. His surreal images reveal the unusual traditions associated with the area, such as the unofficial dress code that sees beachgoers arrive in their finest clothing for a day spent frolicking in the water. 

In Denisse Ariana Pérez’s project Agua, the water itself takes centre stage, as she attempts to understand our connection to this precious resource, taking the viewer on an intimate journey through the “magical relationship” we share with it. Driven by an “obsession” with the human experience, the Caribbean-born, Barcelona-based photographer has always had a fascination with water and says that it allows her to get closer to her subject by “dissolving facades”. She writes in the project’s description: “I keep coming back to water scenes. I keep coming back to lakes, rivers and oceans… Becoming one with water is not about rushing but rather about flowing. And flowing is the closest thing to being.”

Finally, British Journal of Photography’s Decade of Change exhibition showcases and celebrates some of the world’s best climate-focused photography and is composed of images from the winners of this year’s award. Going on show only shortly after a flurry of global natural disasters, these evocative photographs take on added importance, and, set against the stunning Catalonian landscape, serve as a poignant reminder of what we stand to lose.

Speaking on why InCadaqués is such a special event, the festival’s co-founder and president, Valmont Achalme, says: “The light in Cadaqués is incredible, but there is also freedom to be able to explore and experiment outside the traditional exhibition frameworks. One unusual feature is that all the photographs in the festival are for sale, which make things exciting as each photograph becomes an object of desire.’

InCadaqués International Photo Festival will take place from 29 September to 9 October 2022. Tickets are available to purchase through the website.

OpenWalls Arles is a global photography award that exhibits both emerging and established photographers alongside Les Rencontres D’Arles. OpenWalls 2022 opens for entries on 6th October. Pre Register now.

Currently on show at Galerie Huit Arles, the winning series of OpenWalls Arles 2020 presents a succession of derelict human structures juxtaposed against the majestic terrain of California’s Eastern Sierra

In his book Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, Ansel Adams recounts the production history of his 1944 image “Winter Sunrise,” depicting darkened hills beneath the vast, craggy peaks of Mount Whitney, Sierra Nevada. Lone Pine High School graduates had climbed the rocky slopes of the Alabama Hills to whitewash an imposing “L P” against the stone, which the famed American landscape photographer later ruthlessly removed in his negative: “I have been criticised by some for doing this,” he writes, “but I am not enough of a purist to perpetuate the scar and thereby destroy — for me, at least — the extraordinary beauty and perfection of the scene.”

Where Adams epitomised idealised landscape photography, which elevated the natural and the elemental in deliberate omission of human interference, some decades later the “New Topographic” era would materialise in partial response. Through the 1970s, the likes of Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz and Catherine Wagner employed landscape photography to visualise man-made America in all its rigorous banality: monochrome warehouses, industrial sites, parking lots.

It is between these two extremes that the work of Osceola Refetoff, series winner of the OpenWalls Arles 2020 ‘Daily Life’ category, is realised. The work is on show at Galerie Huit Arles until 06 August 2022,  and then by appointment until 26 September. Refetoff’s winning body of work, It’s a Mess Without You, presents a succession of derelict human structures juxtaposed against the majestic terrain of California’s Eastern Sierra. The series exists as part of a wider set of projects surveying man’s presence in the deserts of the American West.

“I’m interested in creating photos that are beautiful,” the photographer tells British Journal of Photography, speaking from his home in Los Angeles. “I’m less interested in creating a world that’s perfect.”

Crucially, to Refetoff, the Eastern Sierra is beautiful despite its earmarks of human development: roads, transmission lines, garbage dumps. “There are no more ‘virgin landscapes’ anywhere on Earth,” he remarks, “and the idea is problematic on so many levels — but particularly in terms of discouraging environmental thoughtfulness.” Characterising his practice as “defiantly old-school” (It’s a Mess Without You is made up solely of single exposures, not composites), the photographer is particularly wary of the dangers of Photoshop in presenting illusory depictions of the natural world. “We expose people to these idealistic images,” he says, “then when we look out and see what’s actually there, they think, ‘that’s not even worth preserving. It’s already ruined.’ We have to get on board with preserving areas that have already been impacted.”

At once dreamlike and hyper-realistic, fragile and formidable, It’s a Mess Without You sees crisp blue skies engulf abandoned alfalfa farms. Jagged mountain tops peek through long-decayed window frames as bright orange sunlight pours over remnants of lives left behind. Partially inspired by Edward Hopper, the project finds new meaning in the age of isolation, when the window has been rendered our foremost way of experiencing the world — a shared symbol of a global crisis. Here, the window is employed not only as an architectural subject, but a narrative device to frame the stories of millennia-old lands, and the tenuous marks we inflict upon them in our wake.

“I’m contrasting the very mortal lives of the people that built and inhabited these structures against a truly timeless backdrop of the Eastern Sierra mountains,” Refetoff explains. “The harsh desert sun is a powerful spotlight to shine on hubris versus mortality — or the grand ambitions of all of us little ant people.”

Shot over ten years, the project dissects the tragedy of abandoned dreams against the vast cultural legacy of California’s deserts — a mythical land, charged with human hope and promised opportunity. Needless to say, for many immigrants and settlers, the West has symbolised a chance to “make it”: picture the opening scene of Clint Eastwood’s classic musical western Paint Your Wagon (1969), showing a succession of caravans bustling across the bountiful landscape in search of fortune and a new life.

The idea was originally propagated through images and text produced and commissioned by the American government to entice citizens and immigrants to settle there; in those pictures, the West exuded promise, natural resources and open land for the taking — a boundless Eden where dreams could be made. While a pantheon of American painters, photographers and filmmakers have fuelled this mythology for over a century, the reality that exists today is a loose patchwork of struggling communities, military-industrial compounds and failed mining projects. In the near future, immense wind and solar projects will likely dominate many areas, transforming the landscape in ways that are complex and irreversible.

Indeed, as Refetoff points out, the myth of the West has always been just that. A myth. Aside from the active displacement and slaughter of large First Nations populations in order to make room for such “dreams”, forging them into realities in such a barren environment was never an easy undertaking. “To this day, a lot of people make a go of it and then abandon their homes,” Refetoff explains — aptly summarising what It’s a Mess Without You is really about: the people who are absent from the frames. “When shooting, so often I’d stand by these windows and think, ‘someone stood here and did dishes and looked at this view for hundreds of hours. Then at some point, they packed up all their stuff and walked out of their home forever.’”

Ultimately, Refetoff considers his wider artistic purpose as engaging Californian people with environmentalism in a different way. Not just in urban centres like Los Angeles, where thinking is already substantially liberal, but crucially within the rural, distinctly conservative desert communities themselves. While the two adjacent populations tread a complex relationship (Refetoff cites the California water wars, a series of political conflicts throughout the 19th century over water rights between LA and farmers and ranchers in the Owens Valley), he uses visual storytelling as a way of appealing to those on both sides of the ideological fault line.

“We live in a sharply partisan country, and words like ‘environmentalism’ are fighting words in a lot of these small desert communities. But we all have to inhabit this planet — so we have to reflect more deeply about how we exploit these resources. We have to act as a society.”

OpenWalls 2022 opens for entries on 6th October. Pre Register now.

“My previous projects were about trajectories and directions, and how hard it can be to get out,” explains the Melbourne-born and based photographer. In his new project, titled Be Angry at the Sun, Bugg turns his lens to the Murray River and its surrounding area in south-east Australia. “I’ve been camping there since childhood, and recently, I’ve been returning with my camera,” he says. “It’s a place of incredible natural wealth, but also an environment highly managed by human intervention. The ecological and Aboriginal approach to land has been discarded. Simply put, the river is slowly dying due to the ongoing belief that it can and should be controlled.”

The health of the river has declined significantly. In a 2012 government assessment of the ecosystem, more than 80 per cent of the river valley was found as having poor or very poor health for aquatic life. In the same year, a $13billion plan was introduced to balance the damage, but a government investigation found that the plans ignored “catastrophic” risks of climate change. Bugg refers to this ecological decay as a ‘slow violence’: a term coined by British author Rob Nixon. ”Slow violence is unseen and ongoing, it isn’t disastrous or spectacular enough to make headlines, but its consequences are dire,” he says. “I am interested in how photography can be used to document something that is invisible, that creeps with time, always out of sight.” 

Bugg was nominated for Ones to Watch by photographer and educator Jack Latham. “James Bugg’s visualisation of slow violence within the landscape demonstrates a deep understanding of not only subject matter, but the role photography plays in depicting it,” says Latham. 

Despite his refocus from small towns to ecological collapse, Bugg still presents his core concerns of “sticking”. He argues that we are stuck in our environmental ideology, and by attempting to control and manage land, we are instead enacting a slow, continuous violence upon it. 

Bugg calls for a return to Aboriginal land practices, a “listening to the river” that kept the basin healthy for centuries before European settlement. “We need to stop treating it as a commodity and instead as an ecology,” he says. “To do that, we first need to listen to the traditional owners of the lands it flows through.” 

jamesbuggphoto.com

Ligia Popławska is one of two series winners with her project Fading Senses, which explores ‘Solastalgia’ – a term coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to describe a state of emotional distress produced by climate anxiety. It began during her MA in Photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp in 2019. “I had temporarily lost a sense of smell, and this experience transformed my sensory perception, influencing the way I perceived various layers of the photographic medium. I started researching how images can trigger other senses than vision and what happens inside a brain during sensory deprivation. At about the same time, a tornado devastated the beloved forest of my home in Northern Poland and the whole ecosystem in the area perished. Later on, I realised that I was affected by ecological grief.”

With that revelation in mind, Popławska began intuitively photographing moments that would emotionally express her state. She sought out places connected to anthropocentric thinking like zoos, and visited a home for the visually impaired to meet the residents there, making portraits and learning how they experience nature through texture, sound and scent. She wanted everything to appear dreamlike, as if inside the mind of someone experiencing Solastalgia or a loss of senses. “I hope this project will bring attention to the fragility and power of our senses as well as how climate change affects our emotional and mental health,” she says. “It’s a young research subject, but perhaps one of the most challenging for us in the near future.”

Also winning in the series category is Kenyan, Cardiff-based artist Cynthia MaiWa Sitei. Their project – If This is a Human: a great curiosity – illuminates the impact the climate crisis has on people with Albinism, particularly in rural areas of Kenya and Tanzania. The rise in temperature is having a hugely detrimental effect on those with little melanin in their skin, says MaiWa, with “the sun being the silent killer”.

Born in 1992, MaiWa moved to the UK in 2010 and studied psychology before pursuing an MA in documentary photography at the University of South Wales in 2017. Her thesis project, Wundanyi, was about “taking the conversation of rape into the African household,” she says. While making this difficult but important work, MaiWa travelled to Wundanyi, Kenya and stayed with her cousin Felicia, a person with Albinism who founded the organisation Persons with Albinism Taita Taveta Country. “Living and going around with Felicia, and noticing how different people would interact with her, inspired this new project,” MaiWa recalls. Later, she met members of Felicia’s group, learned about their experiences, and began to find ways to visualise what it means to have Albinism in a rapidly heating world. The resulting project blends black and white portraits and landscapes with images that are cast in scorched, pinky hues – a nod towards the misconception that people with Albinism have pink eyes, says MaiWa, when actually it’s just the absence of pigment that exposes blood vessels, making eyes appear reddish. “The same myths still circulate,” she says. “I use the different palettes to highlight the hypocrisy, as well as to magnify the effects.”

Decade of Change 2022 Moving Image Winner © Eduardo Pedrosa, Louis de Rohan

Eduardo Pedrosa and Louis de Rohan are the moving image winners of Decade of Change. The Brazilian film maker, and the photographer and climate activist, win with Los Guardianes, a documentary short filmed in 2015 in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern Colombia.. The film shares the environmental wisdom of two elders from indigenous tribes, the Arhuaco and the Kogis, as they discuss their beliefs. “For them, nature and community are both ruled by the single primitive sacred law of nature, and for thousands of years they have avoided colonisation and their culture has survived,” explains de Rohan. “That’s all begun changing in the last 100 years, though, with their civilisations coming under threat from human rights violations, settlers establishing plantations, armed conflict, and climate change altering the conditions in which this agricultural community survives.” He was compelled to create Los Guardianes when travelling with fellow filmmaker and collaborator Eduardo Pedrosa. They shot the film in black and white because it’s “a powerful medium for photojournalism – appropriately intense to carry the weight of the subject matter and show our respect for this moment in history.” 

“We are at a tipping point,” says de Rohan, who began his career as an environmental correspondent for The European Newspaper. “Humanity is paralysed by an existential crisis, indigenous cultures are in rapid decline, and yet, as the global population explodes, threatening the future of the natural world, their vanishing wisdom holds the key to a profound understanding of how humanity can live in balance with it. My vision is to build a body of work that documents that broken connection, using visual storytelling in a time of unprecedented crisis.”

Alongside his film, de Rohan also has a photograph in the Decade of Change single image category, which includes 30 winning images by 22 photographers. It depicts two Kogi people, taken on the same trip as Los Guardianes was filmed. Meanwhile, winning images by Sonia Bhamra and Ayesha Jones also speak to the wisdom we might learn from ancient culture.

Elsewhere, Brazilian photographer Rebeca Binda has two winning images, taken from a project exposing the destruction wrought by mining corporations in the artist’s home state of Minas Gerais. “Back in 2015, the mining company Samarco was oblivious towards the issues with one of their tailings dams, and its failure led to its collapse, causing the biggest ecological crime in Brazilian history,” explains Binda. “It decimated an area the size of Portugal, and the community doesn’t exist anymore.” A slew of toxic mine waste covered the area, contaminating water, soil, vegetation and animals. One of Binda’s pictures is of a horse lying dead in a stream; a tragic and truthful visualisation of the consequences.

Among other winning images, the probing of mining history continues in work by William Mark Sommer, while Thomas Byczkowski also presents a photograph of mines taken in Minas Gerais, Brazil. A story of petrochemical pollution and environmental racism is told in two pictures by Tommaso Rada, and the rapidly diminishing resource of water remains a running metaphor in images by James Bannister and Margaret Courtney-Clarke. For Yosando Faizal and Kirsty Larmour, it is gentrification and the changing backdrops of home that have landed them among the winners, while the power of nature is given a place in Diana Buzoianu’s image of a volcano eruption. Further winners include David Ellingsen, who visualises the mounting extinction crisis, duo Elena and Leonidas Toumpanos who explore the impact of commercial development in the Arctic, and Australian aboriginal artist Wayne Quilliam who offers an aerial shot of one of his homeland’s rivers during a drought. Relatedly, Gavin Doran presents an image taken in the ever-drying region of India’s Thar Desert, while Rui Pedro Oliveira and Greig Ness return us once again to the eerie aftermath of dam building. 

For winners including Valeria Scrilatti, Clair Robins and Richard John Seymour, questions of science and technology drive their practices. Seymour has three winning images, all from the series Landsat Works. “By using data gathered by satellites such as Landsat 8, even the world’s most pristine wildernesses can be examined from space for potential mineral deposits,” he says, explaining that a false colour image can be constructed using data outside the visible spectrum. “My main motivation came from a deep concern for our environment,” he says. “The idea that these techniques can potentially be used to assess our planet’s surface for suitable exploitation sites is a sign of great human ingenuity, but also unearths questions about who and what this collective ingenuity serves.”

Nick St.Oegger, who has been making work focused on Albania for the past decade, also has two images in the final selection. One of those images is from a long-term project he began in 2017 about the Vjosa – one of the last wild, free flowing rivers in Europe. “I came across this fisherman who had built a shelter in between two fortified communist era bunkers, when suddenly, the wind picked up and dark clouds came in” he says. “It was a quick moment, but I really felt like it captured a strong sense of foreboding.” 

As governments across the world repeatedly fail to act on the climate crisis, places like the Vjosa sit on the precipice of history, untouched for now but ever-awaiting destruction. In lieu of that leadership, it is image-makers and activists including these winners who are fighting most urgently for climate action. With photography as their weapon, they hold a mirror to our communities, revealing endless stories of a planet in decline.

“We wanted the materiality of what we were doing to be exactly like the farmers’ land and soil […] like a ritual, as [the farmers] were doing with the land.” 

Caimi | Piccinni began by speaking to those farmers. “People are always at the centre of our stories. We start from there,” says Caimi. They spent time in the countryside – in the village of Gemini, where the first outbreak was detected – and interviewed and photographed the families who have cultivated and cared for the land over many generations. Not only did their livelihoods depend on the olive trees, but their entire existence was deeply intertwined with the nature and climate that surrounded them. While there, Caimi and Piccinni were hosted in an oil mill. They set up a darkroom and began developing the film they were shooting on the spot. “We wanted the materiality of what we were doing to be exactly like the farmers’ land and soil,” Caimi explains. “We wanted to make it like a ritual, as [the farmers] were doing with the land.” The duo leaned into the challenges of developing film in the heat and dust of the Italian summer. “We wanted all of this to go into the pictures.”

As the threat of the bacteria unfurled and travelled north, so did Caimi | Piccinni’s investigation. They spent time in the agronomic research institute in Bari, learning about the science and analysis of the bacteria’s behaviour and movement along the land. The images they shot here are more clinical, well-lit and precise. Some zoom in to the geometric compositions of cells and molecules of plant samples using a microscopic camera, resulting in images of dynamic patterns one can hardly believe were created by organic forms. “We decided to renounce and give up on a monolithic visual approach,” the duo explain. “Why should we put our vision in front of a documentation that requires different tools? [In other projects] we also use our digital cameras, so why shouldn’t we use all the tools necessary to convey the story as precisely as possible.” As the duo continued the research, they continued to respond to the subject when it came to choosing how to photograph it. At times, they renounced their cameras completely, and made use of archive imagery to denote the agricultural and cultural heritage attached to centuries of olive oil farming. 

Together, these storylines form a new book, Fastidiosa, published by Overlapse. From the moment you hold the photobook in your hands, feeling its thickness and weight and thumbing through the various textured papers, you sense that the narrative ahead will be intricate and visually stimulating. Held together with Swiss binding and a fold-out cover, the immersive experience considers the images not only for their documentary function, but their storytelling potential.

“We wanted to use the material not just in a didactic and narrative approach, but also to use the images for their power to evoke and bring the reader into the story. To leave space for the imagination, to raise questions, to put the reader in some kind of enigma of doubt.” The didactic approach was “useless” they say, preferring to tease out “the energy that is hidden inside the picture”.

The book also speaks to a wider issue. It warns that the gravity of the Xylella fastidiosa epidemic is symbolic of a natural environment weakened by climate change and human neglect and greed, in Italy and the rest of the world. The use of pesticides and chemicals has weakened the trees’ natural immune systems, for example, making them more susceptible to diseases they might have previously been able to fight. “It sounds obvious, but we tend to forget that this is a crucial aspect of our lives,” says Caimi. 

Though the crisis is far from over – the disease has also been detected in France, Spain and Portugal – the photographers felt the project was finished. The textured pages are heavy with angst and trauma, but conclude with a sense of hope. In recent years, local agronomists have conducted extensive research into genetically engineered olive trees that are immune to Xylella fastidiosa. However, creating a globalised olive ‘super tree’ eradicates the nuances of that special, local Italian biodiversity. It may not be the ultimate solution, but it is a sign of progress. “It ends where the new story starts,” says Caimi of the book. “And there is optimism.”

caimipiccinni.com

Fastidiosa is published by Overlapse and is available now

Goddard has made other kinds of books before, including graphic novels and flash fiction. His satirical art and writing focuses on urban change, gentrification and ecology, often featuring animals, strange situations and a sense of chaos. 

Die Biester explores similar themes. In sequencing images of people, plants and animals, Goddard blurs the distinctions between nature and the built environment. On one spread, a silhouette of an animal’s cage leads into the scaffolding of a construction site. In another, the thick gnarly trunk of a tree matches the rhythmic swirling smack of jellyfish. Across from an image of a man wearing a werewolf mask, snarling dogs leap with eerie white eyes.

Art about the Anthropocene often features dramatic landscapes and high-tech machines in juxtaposition, yet Goddard, whose PhD explored the gentrification of East London, pays attention to the structures which shape everyday life. Black humour abounds in his portrayal of pets and litter, and in their juxtaposition, he weaves a story around profit, prey and power. The result is a startling, curious and sensitive portrait of the wild around us and within, one which unsettles the idea that nature could ever be controlled.

Die Biester by Patrick Goddard is published by Spheres Projects. 

Ende Gelände, Protesters storm RWE’s Garzweiler mine, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, 2019

Each year, huge groups of activists invade RWE’s massive mines in North Rhine-Westphalia in an effort to end Germany’s continued reliance on coal energy. Germany touts its green reputation with gusto, but nearly a third of its power still comes from climate-killing coal. Scientists says EU countries must phase out coal by 2030, but the year stated in Germany’s exit plan is 2038.

Jan, Katowice, Poland, 2019

Coal mining has a rich cultural heritage in Poland. Each year towns across the Silesian region celebrate Barborka: the feast day celebration of the patron saint of miners. Poland is the only remaining EU country without a phase-out date for coal. Home to Europe’s largest plant, coal is causing a health crisis. An estimated 2,500 early deaths are recorded each year, and a recent study showed that children living near a coal plant in Poland were exposed to levels of cancer-causing black carbon levels four times higher than children in France. 

Sines Power plant, Portugal, 2019

At the time this picture was taken, Sines power plant was active and one of the most polluting plants in Europe. But 2021 saw the closure of Sines, nearly 10 years ahead of schedule. This was followed by the country’s last coal power plant, Pego, in November. Portugal is now coal-free.

The Very Fire They Sit Beside by  Dan Wilton is on show at Huxley-Parlour in London until 12 March. All proceeds from print sales will go to environmental legal charity ClientEarth, dedicated to tackling the climate crisis.

BJP: Why is it important to understand and look back on history in an intersectional way?

JE-C: I would rephrase the question and ask why is looking back on photographic history of value? I say this because I envision each of these presentations as existing, first and foremost, within the histories of photography and visual culture. Of course, this work will be of interest to diverse audiences.

From an educational perspective, artists and photographers will find such histories useful and informative in their understanding of the functionality, the visual quality and materiality of photography. Within the context of broader collective voices there needs to be documentations of photographic histories to ensure that there are appropriate references, visual conversations and dialogues.

Such photographic histories are ‘intersectional’ though perhaps not in the way Kimberlé Crenshaw had intended the word to be used. That is to say, the experiences of dual oppression, including the negative impacts of that lived experience. 

BJP: What connects these images is their scrutiny of industries where people are taking from the land, by way of mining and quarrying for example. Why did you focus on this aspect of the human relationship with the environment for this exhibition?

JEC: That is an interesting question! One response to your question is the appreciation of the visual reference to a place or site, as well as to ‘black collar’ labour. I am interested in who is expected by society to do this work, how they are valued, what their labour conditions are. And what happens when these unsustainable industries collapse and/or are no longer profitable to the capitalists who govern them? Further to that public discourse, I am interested in what happens within the domestic and/or private realm such as the environmental impacts on health.

To better understand the human demand within the industry, one would need to be aware of the local tensions within Bristol around class and ethnicity, and the wider call from the COP26 activism and the contradictions that were taking place at the global, corporate, national, and governmental level. For example when the UK was publicly supporting phasing out coal power energy, at the same time the government was entertaining opening a new coal mine. 

BJP: You mention that particular emphasis was placed on inclusivity and the presentation of different perspectives. Could you elaborate on this, and why it is important?

JEC: I am interested in building ‘communities of practice’. My practice and interests circle around lens-based work (filmmaking and photography), curation, performance and poetry. 

For example, I selected three images that focus on an indigenous-run mine. Indigenous communities are involved in small-scale mining of the lands that they care for. I am interested in learning about how these community mining sites are different from industrial approaches to mining, including how the profits are spent – are they reinvested in the miners and their families or are they divided up between invisible shareholders?

Aida Silvestri’s work addresses how families are implicated in the practice of extraction – the taking away of sexual pleasure, the cutting and extraction from young female bodies – also known as female genital mutilation (FGM). Young people, after all, are unable to protect themselves against the influential control and power of decision-making that they have within their households. The project was commissioned by the human rights and social justice organisation Autograph and the project involved educating NHS workers and the public. Aida’s work, in that sense, is working with industry – that is if we may describe the NHS as a form of industry. 

My project Beneath Us is an example of the reverse. A decommissioned site where people are giving back to the land. It is also a place worthy of commemoration as the oil sourced from that woodland went a long way towards the fight against fascism in the UK, as Texan oil drillers were flown in undercover to exploit and drill that oil for military purposes. Some 70 years later, activists and ordinary people are demanding that fossil fuels be kept in the ground. 

So in this sense, I place inclusivity centre stage, perhaps though I interpreted the word in a nonconventional way.

BJP: What do you hope the viewers will take away from this exhibition? 

JEC. Photography and poetry are in many ways sibling practices; at times I turn to photography and at other moments to poetry – here are the final lines of a poem by Dorianne Laux:

We know we are doomed,

Done for, damned, and still

The light reaches us, falls

On our shoulders even now, 

Even here where the moon is 

Hidden from us, even though

the stars are so far away. 

Intersectional Geographies, curated by Jacqueline Ennis-Cole, is on show at the Martin Parr Foundation from 27 January – 03 April 2022.

JP: What drew you to working within the intersection of art and climate change research?

AC: Worm: art + ecology started in 2014 as my website to share interviews I was having with various cultural practitioners, activists and academics who work on arts and climate issues. We’d talk about why it’s important to them and how their practices add to engagement on climate change. Beginning the project online allowed for a more flexible space for climate and arts to come together as they did. I shared a range of activist and artistic perspectives. I was still an undergraduate then, uploading articles in my free time. The project developed as I began to be commissioned to produce exhibitions, though I continued working anonymously under this name. These projects brought me to a new experiment of communicating climate change issues through artworks.

Recently, I started using my name as I began to work offline. In-person, I deliver public talks, facilitate as an educator at universities or run workshops with youth groups. And, this year I began building up my own research-art practice. I’ve been working as a research consultant in international climate and cultural policy too, which gives me other cross-sector challenges to think through in my personal practice. These are the activities that have really given depth to my existing strategies, because they’ve helped hone how I hold a space for climate engagements, especially as I forefront colonial climate histories and contemporary racial and social struggles as key themes.

There is an important element of self-archiving in the projects I do. How do we record the sidelined, unwritten or even erased cultural narratives of climate histories (and those in the making)? It’s about ensuring that inclusive counter narratives to the hegemony are supported and sustained.

JP: What impact can art have on knowledge and learning around climate change?

AC: I think the imaginative capacity of the arts can be encouraging. Some people say that the arts give a more ‘emotive’ or ‘sensory’ understanding of the climate and social justice issues around us than politics, the media, sciences and so on. I guess that can be true, but I feel the value is in something even more concrete and less art-speak than that, which is in simply talking through and experimenting with how communicating ideas can disrupt the uncertainties the climate crisis might overwhelm us with through information, feelings or social divisions. Maybe it links back to how I see my practice: to do useful research and communicate climate change as the intent, not to produce ‘climate art’ itself. I’m excited by these communal ways of (un)learning, and how we can push more inclusive actions to take hold.

JP: What is possible when we use speculative fiction to imagine alternative futures around climate change?

AC: I am drawn to how justice is integrated into the science fiction worldbuilding by authors of systemically minority backgrounds, such as Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany. Stories often advocate for racial, social and climate justice, as well as queer, trans and disability rights as a given criteria for a secure, safe and healthy future. So I feel it’s not only about the imagining of futures that’s significant, but also the understanding of how to bring historical facts and real experiences into shaping a more just future for all.

Paraphrasing a text I wrote for my exhibition Climate Knowledges, I like that we can explore alternative ways to think about the truths of the climate crisis through speculative storytelling, from ancient mythologies to futuristic science fiction. These can confront the colonial and patriarchal origins, and their exploitative processes, that produced the current climate crisis. Radical climate science fiction reconciles with the mistreatment of race, class, disability and gender politics in the mainstream climate debate, by reaching beyond and building fairer worlds.

JP: Why is it important to center anti-colonial climate narratives?

AC: The climate crisis has been unnaturally caused by the long violence of oppressive powers on peoples and their lands. For example, we can look to the colonisation and genocide of Indigenous peoples by European invaders to the Americas in the 1500s, which caused advanced agricultural lands to regrow, and shift the global CO2 levels. I think cultural narratives are really significant in telling truths that should inform public climate framings. Why does it take Western sciences to prove that Indigenous cultural and climate histories are truths? Analysing how power and knowledge is structured is interesting to me in thinking about how this moment of history will be documented for the next generations too. It’s about asking questions like: “What constitutes knowledge about climate change?”, “Who is in control of producing and sharing information?”, “How does this information benefit or compromise marginalised groups?

JP: When working within or adjacent to institutional settings, how do you identify and resist the widespread tendency towards greenwashing?

AC: It’s important to raise that I see many parallels between the mainstream arts and the global North’s climate movement. Both are inaccessible to certain demographics, restricting who gets to be involved and steer the actions. In their overlap, there is a business-as-usual sustainability approach in the arts. The green capitalism that has stemmed from colonial exploitations that continue today through frameworks like free market imperialism, curatorial programmes as extractive exercises, while major patrons are active in fossil fuels and arms industries.

As an independent practitioner, I have unfortunately witnessed countless individuals, small organisations and national institutions who not only co-opt the global climate struggles for their artistic careers or programmes, but also actively exclude the people who have long practiced intersectional approaches to the issues and are often speaking from lived experiences. There are many examples of how greenwashing can be avoided: redistributing resources to community organisers and practitioners who are actually fighting for climate justice, rather than to blockbuster artists who use extractive processes to create ‘climate art’; not speaking over or for marginalised people in tokenistic and silencing tactics; budgeting for greener, more accessible and ethical practices; financing longer term public engagements on anti-colonial climate issues, rather than treating it as a one-off, tick-boxed curatorial season.

angelaytchan.com

“I was less interested in capturing these images than in looking for ways to tell the wider story of Russia’s Arctic deployment, and to offer a sense of the remoteness of the place. I was keen, too, to try and convey what daily life must be like for the soldiers posted to such a challenging corner of the Earth.” 

After a period of adverse weather that left Ducke stranded in the nearby city of Murmansk for days on end, unable to leave the mainland, he eventually arrived at the Trefoil Base aboard a Ilyushin Il-76 military cargo plane. On arrival, he was immediately swept off on a tour of the facilities. The troops were busy making preparations for a launch of the Bastion anti-ship missile system and they were eager to demonstrate its power. As he explains, this “was a show of might” intended to awe friend and foe alike. But for Ducke, his focus lay elsewhere. “I was less interested in capturing these images than in looking for ways to tell the wider story of Russia’s Arctic deployment, and to offer a sense of the remoteness of the place,” he says. “I was keen, too, to try and convey what daily life must be like for the soldiers posted to such a challenging corner of the Earth.” 

The sheer isolation of the military base is shown in Ducke’s photos of the various facilities, which are almost disappearing, “against a backdrop of such white emptiness that the horizon becomes difficult to discern”. In every image, this icy void envelops the few figures and buildings that make up the base. The only cultural sign on the frozen expanse is a tiny wooden church that stands in juxtaposition with the sterile metal structures nearby. Elsewhere, an icebreaker can be seen clearing a path for a cargo ship following closely behind. Ducke says he remembers the silence that surrounded him as he watched the ship slowly making its way through the ice. He remembers feeling “as if we were at the end of the world”.

The sluggish movement of solitary ships and the small, reclusive groups of soldiers may soon be a thing of the past, however. With the Arctic melting at an unprecedented rate, Russia’s Arctic border is rapidly becoming easier to navigate, raising questions about how this will affect activity in the region.

In the event of war, Russia’s formidable size may prove to be its greatest weakness – whereas the frozen Arctic Ocean once acted as a barrier to the land, it is now transforming into a large access point. Military outposts like the Trefoil Base have been set up as a deterrent to any countries that may be interested in the changes unfolding in the area. NATO, for instance, has already begun sailing convoys of ships into nearby waters, testing the Russian response to its presence.

But according to Ducke, an increase in military operations may not be the only result of the Arctic’s opening up. He believes that disappearing ice may also act as an invitation to the Russian people. Looking forward, he says “I am curious how the increased access to the Arctic and its resources will affect communities in Russia’s Far North. Many of the settlements on Russia’s Arctic borderline have faced a massive outflux of population since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but as it becomes more accessible this might change, possibly bringing new life to a remote and isolated region.”

emileducke.de