©Florence Iff, algae, lichen, insects from Days of Future Passed

Each year during Earth Week I curate a collection of photographic projects from artists who are working to make the often-invisible nature of the global climate and the ecological crisis more visible using conceptual, lens-based art techniques. The arts – and the visual arts in particular – have a unique capacity to confront audiences with uncomfortable truths, provoke meaningful discussion, foster empathy, and inspire individuals to take action on today’s most pressing issues.

Today, we’re looking at Florence Iff‘s project, Days of Future Passed.

Introduced first to photography by her grandfather, she uses photography as a medium and explores boundaries by combining different types of images based on either analog or digital formats. Her archive serves as a source as well as web-based photographs. The content of the work determines the use of traditional and/or cross-disciplinary techniques. Her main subject since 1998 is the ecological crisis.

©Florence Iff, heap of cars, mushrooms, James-Webb picture of the universe from Days of Future Passed

Days of Future Passed

We have created technologies to see and change smallest molecules, we get images of galaxies from 40 million light years away, every day we discover in the depths of the sea, the earth and the universe previously unknown and at the same time we destroy both our and most other organisms basis of life. Like a last gasp just before collapse, we catch a brief glimpse into the miracle of existence and witness it in shock.

We are not only the perpetrators of the sixth mass extinction, we document the decay, archiving in drawers the legacy we have destroyed for bacteria and fungi that will outlive us. We look for survival possibilities in the universe and penetrate persistently with toxins into the deepest layers of the earth.

Freely after Hegel: since cycles of life and death close and renew themselves, since nothing exists of duration except the constant change, we must reconcile ourselves with the certainty of the self-destruction of mankind.

The primordial soup, however, continues to make new life possible, intermolecular forces evolve things still unknown to us, fungal spores fly to distant planets, and jellyfish unfold in their most perfect beauty. Time and space intertwine. Just as interdependence and interconnectedness of living beings have always existed, man- made materials additionally create novel adaptations and entanglements of the originally organic artificial and the solely organic.

In my wanderings I find signs, clues, the unexpected, the depressing and the hopeful. For years I have photographed and collected material of disappearance and destruction, whether natural in origin or man-made, transforming my studio simultaneously into an archive and a laboratory.

These photographs serve as a record of what once was, how and why it was destroyed and archived, what remains underthe circumstances, forming symbiotic relationships, adapting, surviving and possibly healing.

©Florence Iff, catacomb painting, archived flamingos, Physarum Polycephalum from Days of Future Passed

©Florence Iff, Days of Future Passed, parrot nesting in concrete, giant fern petrification

©Florence Iff, Days of Future Passed, precambrian rock sample, exceptional cloud formation, James-Webb picture of the universe

©Florence Iff, Days of Future Passed, extinct bird, moss-spores, mushrooms

©Florence Iff, Days of Future Passed, plastic waste, mold, Pterosaur

©Florence Iff, Days of Future Passed, prehistoric coral, dried up ground, bird traces, algae and bacteria on wall

©Florence Iff, Days of Future Passed, plastic bags in tree, insect, jellyfish

©Florence Iff, Days of Future Passed, moonfish, bacteria, lichen on dam wall

©Florence Iff, Days of Future Passed, microplastic, fish-petrification, mussels on plastic barrel

©Florence Iff, Days of Future Passed, earth/moss/mold, disposed refrigerators, glass models of marine invertebrates