Navigating the Future (2024) is a wall-based installation comprised of found images, discarded consumer objects, obsolete tech (e-waste), and other materials that both serve human development and destruction. It focuses on planetary health in the broadest sense, from the geological scale to the human scale. The work moves between the individual, societal, and planetary scale, in an attempt to diagnose our planetary health in the age of resource depletion, land degradation and rising climate anxiety. The work draws attention to lithium´s role in mental health as well as its role in renewables and alternative energy. Like my earlier work No Lithium, No Work (2023), it references the fact that lithium carbonate is a longstanding treatment for bipolar disorder and related mood disorders (and also being studied as a treatment for Alzheimer’s and dementia) and that lithium carbonate is also the central component in the rechargeable revolution, underpinning everything from electric cars to smart phones to solar panels. The title of the work is from the name of a 2022 US Department of Defense war game and conference focusing on climate change.

 

Image above:
Wind Turbine Ruins (from the installation Navigating the Future), archival inkjet print on alu-dibond, laptop keys, 38 x 26 cm 
photo: Norbert Miguletz, Kunststiftung DZ Bank, Frankfurt