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Return the Earth
Photography
2021-2026
Wien
Project Description
Perhaps when you look at these images you see portraits of people.
I see a portrait of planet earth.
A portrait of our shared breath with, and among, the other life-forms we are composed of. One that reveals the fluidity and complexity which exists between organisms, environments and planets. Bodies, celestial and vulnerable, rock and flesh, becoming each other in time. The earths capacity for self repair mirroring our own.
I started this series to try and understand how I was connected to nature, and what part of me was human within that connection. As a queer person I struggled for a long time to feel like I was natural. In the islands where I am from it is seen as something that goes against the laws of nature. It felt strange being surrounded by so much life and not feeling like I could be a part of it. I started taking these portraits to see how I was similar to other human beings. To understand that I was human as well, and could be part of nature.
Though in these images the human disappears, coalescing with their environment. I wanted to situate the humanity of the people who I photograph, my family and friends, within the chaos of nature. To depict them being consumed by it, yet emerging from it. To depict them as completely organic, and to see myself and our species reflected in that.
I took these photographs on film and developed them myself, using tools in which the final outcome is unknown. It was important for me to bring the images to life through a fluid process, one that shows how they have been created. The photographs have all been exposed multiple times, layered with different life forms through both colour and black and white 35mm film.
For an organism to live it must maintain itself and resist dissolution. Yet to survive we must embrace dissolution. The dissolution of hierarchy, of the traditional structures we fall back upon in times of crisis. The process of taking these photographs on film, layering and developing them, was a way for me to practice that dissolution, a way for me to navigate the unknowability of our shared future, and the queerness of my own identity.
This ongoing series is a search for what connects us, humans to organisms to ecosystems to planets to life. Life to non-life. It is a search for what it is to be alive. And what it is to return to it.