Photography highlighting our climate change responsibility

'Future Scenarios' is an exploration of our vulnerability and potential adaptability to global warming.

In the collaborative selection of works by photographers Teo Ormon-Skeaping and Lena Dobrowolska, Future Scenarios is an extremely important yet poignant narrative of the responsibly we hold for climate change, but also the possibility humans have to adapt to changing environments.

Ormon-Skeaping and Dobrowolska worked alongside leading climate change scientists, researchers and policymakers in the Global South and the UK in Future Scenarios, they discovered the vulnerable narrative surrounding nations most exposed to climate change had actually developed narratives of resilience and adaption rather than helplessness.

Future Scenarios initially started as a year-long residency called Culture and Climate Change Scenarios, it intended to explore the potential artists have as climate change researchers by collaborating with environmental institutions. Although the residency ended in 2017, Ormon-Skeaping and Dobrowolska have continued to work with researchers in the form of Future Scenarios.

The photos are powerful, from over the last seven years they capture day-to-day lives of people displaced due to climate change, or those who’ve adapted to live amongst it – some images are even of climate change in mid-throw, forest fires, rising sea levels, disappearing glaciers and destroyed buildings and environments.

 

In all the photos the camera is split between taking on a role of someone responsible and acting as a voyeur, watching the events unfold yet remaining detached from the context. In an interview with Ormon-Skeaping and Dobrowolska on Palm* Studios, they reveal the camera was to act as the ‘Western Gaze’: “In the UK particularly, climate change remains a distant, far away, future that will largely happen to someone or something else in a landscape of which most of us have never visited. Most image consumers therefore largely view those who are affected by climate change or pollution or war for that matter, in much the same way as the victorians or edwardians viewed colonial subjects or distant landscapes in 19th or 20th century photographs: as exotic and far flung.”

They continue: “As much as we can foster empathy and a sense of solidarity through this work, it is hard to make someone take on real long term engagement with climate catastrophe. If however, as the Climate School Strikers have demanded, climate change (we would also like colonial studies) was taught in schools from a very early age and the principals of climate justice were entrenched in our moral psyche, this may change. Whether we have time for this to happen is another question.”

Using film installations and photography to visualise the information they have obtained working with climate change researchers, institutions and through their travels, Ormon-Skeaping and Dobrowolska have turned Future Scenarios into something bigger than your usual photo-series – It has become its own climate movement, not stopping until every human finally realises this is the biggest threat facing mankind and something needs to be done: “If we could sustainably heat our exhibition spaces up to 40°C with a humidity of 100% and leave a pile of rotting garbage in the corner, we would, because that is what climate change feels and smells like. The problem is probably not many people would stick around to read our captions or watch the hour long film if we did that.”

 

words
Phoebe Gardner
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Via Teo Ormond-Skeaping Instagram