Earth, air, water, and fire. The four essential elements that were once believed to make up the entire universe are also still the basis of our economic principles: digging, burning, melting, evaporating, in order to fill the pockets of the 1% with money, at the expense of the planet and those other 99% of us who inhabit it, the people who have no ambition or way of leaving.
Photobook Week Aarhus will draw on the poetic cycle of life and death in the Anthropocene as the background for considerations of the multiple crises that we are facing, the necessary changes, and possible ways forward into the uncertain times that await us.
While the media haunts us with fearful images of our vanishing planet, many artists have developed strategies to leave the surface level and dig deeper into the real problem of the environmental crisis in order to reveal who has the real power and how pollution, extraction, destruction, and negation are part of a fraudulent and dangerous global puppet show, where a few players pull all the strings, and we all dance to their rhythm.
Moritz Neumüller, PWA Chief Curator
Please feel free to download a teaser of our festival catalog as PDF.