Days of Future Passed
© 2022 ongoing
We have created technologies to see and change smallest molecules, we get images of galaxies from 40 million light years away, every day we discover in the depths of the sea, the earth and the universe previously unknown and at the same time we destroy both our and most other organisms basis of life. Like a last gasp just before collapse, we catch a brief glimpse into the miracle of existence and witness it in shock.
We are not only the perpetrators of the sixth mass extinction, we document the decay, archiving in drawers the legacy we have destroyed for bacteria and fungi that will outlive us. We are searching the universe for ways to survive, while at the same time persistently infiltrating the deepest layers of the earth with toxins.
The primordial soup, however, continues to make new life possible, intermolecular forces evolve things still unknown to us, fungal spores fly to distant planets, and jellyfish unfold in their most perfect beauty.
Just as interdependence and interconnectedness of living things and things have always existed, man-made materials additionally create novel adaptations and entanglements of the artificial and the organic.
In my wanderings I find signs, clues, the unexpected, the depressing and the hopeful. For years I have photographed and collected material of disappearance and destruction, whether natural in origin or man-made, transforming my studio simultaneously into an archive and a laboratory.
These photographs serve as a record of what once was, how and why it was destroyed and archived, what remains under the circumstances, forming novel symbiotic relationships and interdependencies, adapting, surviving and possibly healing.
