Project ongoing. Download the project pitch here.
Rooted in over 600 kilometers of trekking through remote landscapes of Iceland, Argentina, Sweden, and Scotland, Rebirth explores the connection of the human body to Nature. These encounters between body and landscape expose the paradox of being inherently part of Mother Earth and yet so in conflict with her. They show how we are caught between power over and vulnerability to Nature, as well as connection to and isolation from Nature. Rebirth is a photographic series that explores the defining tension of our time: humanity’s simultaneous power to destroy Mother Earth and capacity to renew. Amid climate anxiety and cultural alienation, we are now facing a world that feels suspended between two states – either on the brink of rebirth, or on the brink of destruction. Both paths remain possible, and the choice is ours to make. This series offers not answers, but a space to sit with contradiction.
What have we forgotten?
'Rebirth' began out of a frustration of our disconnect from nature – raw , “uncivilized”, and uncontrolled. It began through hundreds of kilometers of trekking and tenting in landscapes the “civilized” city is banned from, isolated and starved of. It began as an inquiry into what we’re losing. Where do we belong? And, when physically stripped of all forms of modernity, how does the human body fit into Nature? What have we forgotten? Since the beginning questions, it’s evolved into a lot more.
Throughout this journey, swimming through freezing waterfall lakes to get to a rock and shooting the picture, stripping down in a wind-swept Icelandic lava desert, to perching down my naked self on the Scottish highland hills, more questions started to unfold. My body soaked in stories and the aliveness of the Land. Our relation of power over Nature, our Western viewpoint of ‘us’ and ‘Nature’, rather than simply ‘Nature’. The intermingled fates of the exploitation of Earth and women.
We Are Nature, We Are Animals
Feeling my body prickle under dewy grass strands in Swedish Lapland’s mountain passes, feeling my feet freeze from the cold when I strip down and touch Earth, I began on a journey of deconstructing these viewpoints. I merge with nature, we are one. The human body, in its nudity, raw and animalistic - we are Nature, we are animals.
The Myth of the Wild
I began to question our perception of the ‘wild’, and began to view it as an inherently colonial and possessive concept. Something feral and unlawful and uncontrollable. We are the wild (by definition we are only not wild because we've been tamed or civilized and thus exist in a world of duality – of us and them). But, it has come so far that we’ve suppressed most our 'wildness'. I began asking questions on body image and our fear of nudity, our shame of it – of skin blemishes, of fat rolls. I encourage you to try, feel your body, raw on the forest floor. They merge so softly as the ocean into the horizon … it belongs. Where did these beliefs of disconnect emerge from? How has the depiction of the body in art, media and landscape evolved over the last centuries?
The Observer and the Observed
The observer and the observed, I also begun to question – in landscape photography our place as still ‘outside’ of the landscape, the ‘pristine’ (alternatively to the ‘wild’) – the body, dressed and draped in hiking clothes or shoes or any of the sort more an alien imposition into the pristineness of the landscape. A distraction, an impurity. Why is that so? How has this perception come to be?
These photographs are but insights into this larger journey of inquiry. It is ever-ongoing.
I plan of continuing this project, and writing up all stories and research I’ve done with it, to eventually publish as a book.