The Sixth Day

Maternal and cruel, elementary and un-endingly complex – nature maintains the world’s balance through its dual essence. Suddenly the human race arrives with its dreams, ambitions and all-consuming need for security. Humans subjugate their environment, model it and use fire, language, reasoning and pictures to evolve and survive. They rely on nature for sustenance while exploiting it to excess, they also derive inspiration and seek refuge in it. In other words, they consume.

The various manifestations we experience due to the climate change all find roots in one perhaps neglected factor: the human-nature relationship. Our technological and urban developments have been weakening the connection – if not promoting the dissociation – between us and the natural realm. With our growing disengagement, we tend to care less about the problems affecting the environment, until we find ourselves facing pressing matters, like we are today.

The series proposed is a visual exploration of this human-nature relationship, questioning the place of nature in our lives today, how we regard it, and our seemingly utilitarian interaction with it. This quest takes form through an inwards speculation, a retrospection and examination based on three levels of consciousness or forms of interaction with nature: an ideal conjured up and experienced only from a distance, an interaction predisposed to a human desire for control and consumerism, and an invaded intimacy built to evoke our awakening.

Instead of bleak and accusing photographs, the viewer is invited into a poetic internalized world of deceleration and contemplation. The result is an entanglement between man-made and collected, harmony and dissonance, conviviality and conquest. The work incites the necessity to re-examine our behavior and relationship with the environment.

There was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.