SOAP Art and Publishing

The images we made within the walls of Pietro’s house during the residency are Taxonomy, Post Home, and The Creation of Adam. Like so many other villages and towns in this region, it is marked by migration. Pietros’ house is located close to the abandoned communal baking oven at what one time must have been a busy intersection of the village. We worked for days at a time without seeing anyone pass by. Contrary to this silence the cafe – which creates the current center of the town housing the grocery shop, the restaurant, and the bar – echoes conversations that agilely move between Italian and other European languages.

On a journey to Herculaneum, the coastal dwelling which was wiped out by Vesuvius massive eruption in 79BC, we learned the story of a boy who had been found hiding under a baker’s table clutching a bread as the town was buried under a torrent of mud.  The seal baked into the bread’s crust with the name of the family it belonged to was still legible, his destiny, the suffocation, the sudden violent death defined our concerns. 

“The need of the moment wins over the promises of a future.” (Knausgaard  My Struggle)

Climate crisis caused by a combination of human-induced is fundamentally changing existence as we know it. If we continue on the path we are mapping here the change will have apocalyptic consequences.  The main causes are that the greenhouse gasses, mainly carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are at the highest in 66 million years.  It is destroying the geological and biological systems that current life forms, animals and humans alike, depend on. Icecaps and glaciers which regulate global temperature and keep the earth from overheating are melting and forests that capture carbon and create oxygen are disappearing at an alarming rate. It is argued that the process is catapulting the globe into another geological time period that is called the Anthropocene, a name that suggests humanity now makes up the largest impact on all-natural earthly systems.  

For many, mostly in the global south but also in the very north, the dystopic future is already a fact. We see an unprecedented loss of biodiversity, extinction, mass migration, conflict, and political unrest caused by deforestation, increasing temperatures, water shortage, desertification, wildfires, loss of permafrost, and toxic pollution created mainly by the use and extraction of fossil fuel and mining industries. While the majority of the world’s leaders are in agreement about the danger of this and have agreed to try to damage control and commit to a fossil-free future the world's governments have been unable to launch the measures that could keep us within an acceptable global temperature rise.  

It is a bewildering time, our news feeds are inviting us into ever more complex processes that are difficult to navigate and make sense of. The images in Geology on Speed, are an interlaced selection of personal moments, portraits, activism, untouched land and industrial landscapes.

We gave the work compiled at the residency the title, The Bread Boy of Herculaneum. So far it stretches across five chapters comprising The Word for World is Forest, Post-home, Taxonomy, The Creation of Adam, and Geology on Speed; these chapters can be read or seen individually and as part of an interrelated whole. We lost 2 years in production due to the pandemic but the project continues.