Earthlings.
With this photographic series, I question our sensitive link to nature, our connection to the Earth and the reality that surrounds us in a world affected by climate change.
Shaped since the Age of Enlightenment in an opposition human/animal and nature/culture, our relationship with reality became poorer over time. The latter now fetishizes rationality rather than educating us as earthlings, capable of observing the Earth, of listening to it, of feeling like we belong to it. As a result, this rationality develops a destructive model of society that depreciates ancestral knowledge, spiritual beliefs, intergenerational transmission of knowledge and our sensitivity to the living world.
Inspired by intersectional writings, I realized that this rational model developed by Western countries represented knowledge and power and, consequently, domination. We just have to observe the ecological crisis from an environmental justice or injustice point of view to notice that its impact is not the same on the different categories of population, whether we are dominant or dominated.
The analysis made by the Indian activist Vendana Shiva is a very good example of this balance of power. She observes that the traditional food production system (in India and in other countries) creates a stable and local economy and ecology. The latter allows a balance obtained by intergenerational know-how, knowledge of the ecosystem, mastery of seeds and respectful integration of humans into this environment. This balanced is disrupted, even broken, with the arrival of northern countries, for example, coming to exploit resources for capitalistic purposes (oil drilling, mining, deforestation, agro industry, etc.). Then local populations lose their capacity for self-sufficiency and the knowledge acquired over many generations is forgotten.
Then, « How do we recapture the earth, how do we take it back from a devastating system? » writes French-Moroccan essayist and activist Fatima Ouassak? How can we make the vital and nourishing resources offered by the earth accessible to all? How can we imagine tomorrow without continuing to destroy our planet as if it were a world with inexhaustible resources?
My wish, by assembling two or three photos, is to reunify human beings with the living world around us. The idea is not simply to criticize a destructive and enslaving model but rather to remind us that there are other ways of inhabiting the world that would be beneficial to a larger part of the population. Our rational societies exist and also possess many virtues. How can we then coexist and restore meaning, life and credibility to the sensitive, ancestral, spiritual, natural and supportive that bind us to the Earth? How can we invent a new narrative in which we become earthlings again?
Sources:
Vendana Shiva, Restons vivantes, Rue de l’échiquier, 2022
Fatima Ouassak, Pour une écologie pirate, La Découverte, 2023
Geneviève Provost, Quotidien politique, La Découverte, 2021