PYLOT Magazine Online: You Will End By Destroying The Earth
In a month of unseasonable heat, when world leaders met to discuss an uncertain future and hurricanes hit the British coast, we spoke with art collective désolé about their confronting and emotive inaugural exhibition.
“Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the Earth’’
– Albert Schweitzer
On Saturday the 12th of December, 195 countries signed the Paris agreement following the UN Summit on Climate Change (COP21). The event, in implicating real and tangible changes, was effectively the culmination of talks which began in Berlin in 1995.
Désolé, a collective of individuals spanning disciplines from music to science, held the final night of their show just hours before the decision was reached.
The collective, including Adam Popli, Elena Cremona and artistic duo Simon & Simon, look to challenge our shared apathy through breathtaking landscapes haunted by humanity – our presence to be found in ghostly limbs, plastic waste, and the sour taste of consumerism left upon spoilt land and melting ice.
Elena’s pink washed postcards from Iceland have featured on PYLOT before: alien landscapes shot in infrared captured our attention for their ability to show us something known, yet entirely unfamiliar. In her latest work, the concept of global warming, an abstract notion in itself, finds personification in once snow dusted rock and dark fissures cut into unfreezing ice. The cracking sounds of this world (our world) ripping at its seams accompanied Elena whilst she documented the changing face of Iceland.
In ‘Limbscapes’ we see nature spliced with the unwanted, unnerving presence of ‘us’. The limbs are at once in perfect synergy with their environment – skin tones matching the ochre hue of the rocks, curves of the body as their own landscape in miniature – yet also oddly jarring. Separated from their whole, the limbs seem disjointed and strange; movements cut and paste from other situations, body parts washed up on shore. The sense of alienation and death reflective of our relationship with our natural surroundings: instinctively part of it, yet forcefully removed.
‘I stand for change!’, a short film by Adam Popli, shows a solitary figure clothed in black. He returns ice to water; water falls in reverse: a wishful thought of damage being undone. Scenic vistas are interjected with scenes of refuse; plastic litters the rock face like man made weeds, a washing machine stands vigil over a road that cuts through the countryside. When the film ends, and the figure finally faces us, it’s to hold out the ice and a human head formed in polystyrene, imploring us perhaps, to choose.
Curated by Elizabeth Fleur Willis, and hosted by Metro Imaging, the exhibition sought to expose the quiet destruction of our world, and through our inaction, our role within its demise. Introduced with words of action over the mourning, heartfelt sounds of musical collective ‘Rains’, the exhibition blended warnings and hope for the future through the unique meeting of art, film, music and science.
We spoke with the artists following the exhibition to ask their thoughts on the Paris agreement, of art as a vehicle for social change, and the creatives that inspire them politically.
Full interview here: https://www.pylotmagazine.com/you-will-end-by-destroying-the-earth/
