Occidental

Richard Mosse
AuG 24–Oct 22

At the crux of teetering climate tipping points and mass extinction, widespread ecocide unfolds in the Amazon Basin. Employing his distinctive documentary approach, Richard Mosse travelled to Rio Tigre in the remote northeast of Peru to document oil spills seeping from abandoned pipeline infrastructure on Kichwa Indigenous Territory, deep in the forest.

Alongside these photographs of environmental catastrophe on Indigenous land, Mosse carried out a broader examination of the Western nature-culture dichotomy at play in the Amazon. Using the same Geographic Information Systems (GIS) imaging technology as widely used by mining and agribusiness interests throughout the rainforest, he began photographing domesticated plants within the homes, workplaces and public spaces of people living in the Brazilian city of Belém do Pará, a tropical city at the gateway to the Amazon.

Occidental offers a meditation on Western paradigms that separate nature and culture, one handed down to us from Aristotle and the Old Testament, which has traditionally placed humans and their culture outside of nature. Nature is variously understood as dangerous and in need of taming, colonizing, mastering, or destroying, or conversely as a pure or primordial space only existing in the absence of humans. The devastating consequences of ecological mismanagement by multinational oil companies on Kichwa lands is in stark contrast to their ways of living within nature, which is common among Indigenous peoples. Meanwhile, the cultural veneration and domestication of plants seems antithetical to the forest’s widespread and normalized destruction, carried out by millions, yet may even lie at its roots.

This exhibition runs concurrently to the Pacific Northwest premiere of Richard Mosse’s Broken Spectre, presented at the Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art at Lewis & Clark College in partnership with Converge 45. Broken Spectre is a dreamlike immersive video artwork documenting fronts of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest using a range of scientific imaging technologies. Shifting in scale and medium, the film takes a careful look at the processes involved in the destruction of the world’s largest tropical rainforest by agribusiness, logging, and mining interests–99% of which, according to a recent report, are illegal. The film employs multispectral GIS techniques, as used in remote sensing satellites, reflective UV microscopy, and B&W 35mm infrared footage, to create a film that examines processes of the Amazon’s destruction through historic, activist, journalistic and anthropological prisms, with reference to the Western and other iconography from the history of cinema. It was produced in collaboration with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten and composer Ben Frost.