Hevea brasiliensis (Rubber Tree Canopy), Michelin Rubber Plantation, Bahia, Brazil. Archival pigment print, 42 × 52 ½ in. © Karolina Karlic.

Archives, fieldwork, teaching, directing a new MFA program, piloting a climate-conscious coalition across the UC system, directing Unseen California, contributing to a festival for Earth Day at UCSC, Karolina Karlic’s practice and ecological engagement have long been a deep source of inspiration.

In her ongoing Rubberlands series, the artist’s delicate, patient, and humanistic photographic practice is on full display. The land, the trees, the people, the architecture, the archival research, and the photographic experiments form a connective tissue akin to the ramifications of rubber extraction and manufacturing the artist traces across continents.

Karolina Karlic’s work appeared on my radar as I was finishing a practice-based PhD in photography in Brussels, Belgium. At that time, I was fleshing out like-minded theories of photography’s role in bringing us into the ecological crisis and the geological picture of the Anthropocene. I vividly remember watching Lightwork’s video presentation of Rubberlands at the heart of a cold Belgian winter, probably in February/March of 2018. The fact that I was able to watch this video far from where it was made and the various places Karlic photographed in Rubberlands, is a perhaps testament to the very dynamics of globalization.

What follows is an exchange I had with Karolina over email and in a summer 2026 marked by a developing El Niño event, marine heatwaves in Southern California, and catastrophic wildfires back to SW France where I grew up and where my ecological consciousness and engagement stems from.

Yogan Muller (YM):
Karolina, we are UC colleagues chatting in the middle of the summer, a time academics cherish for rest, dreaming, and working on personal projects. Can you give us a glimpse into what you’re currently cooking up?

Karolina Karlic (KK):

Summer is my season for returning.

During the academic year I’m teaching, mentoring students, writing, organizing projects, and constantly moving between conversations. Summer allows me to slow down and return to the field, sharpen pencils in my studio, and reset. I spend more time walking than driving, more time listening than photographing.

Lunch Break Room for Plantation Managers, Michelin Rubber Plantation, Bahia, Brazil. Archival pigment print, 42 × 52 ½ in. © Karolina Karlic.

Right now I’m continuing work on Rubberlands, a project I’ve been living with for over a decade, while beginning a new chapter of Unseen California with a new cohort of artists. I am collaborating with colleagues across the UC system for a multi-year initiative called the UC Climate Action Arts Network which is filling the majority of my time and generating new relationships in the arts. More than ever, I’m interested in creating the conditions for meaningful encounters — between artists and scientists, between people and place, and between different ways of knowing.

I’ve realized that the photograph is rarely the beginning of the work. It usually arrives after I’ve built a relationship with a place.

“The photograph isn’t the destination.

It’s what remains after a relationship has been built.”

– Karolina Karlic

YM:
With Unseen California (https://www.unseencalifornia.com/), an interdisciplinary art research initiative you co-founded in 2021, you direct attention to California’s ecological issues by immersing yourself, resident artists, and students in the UC Natural Reserve System and its many sites. What has this site-specific approach revealed?

KK:
The biggest surprise has been realizing how little I knew.

Reimagined Meadow Post-Debris Flow,Big Creek, Pre-/Post-Dolan Fire, Big Sur, California.
Reproduction of hand-inked photogravure print installed with various risograph film-still prints on cotton paper, Probably Gallery, Los Angeles.
© Karolina Karlic. Installation photograph © Heather Rasmussen.

When Joseph Gallegos and I founded Unseen California, we did so because I no longer believed that one artist — or one way of seeing — could adequately represent California. Every landscape holds multiple histories, so it deserves multiple perspectives.

One of my students once arrived at a reserve, I believe we were at the Granite Mountains Desert Research Center in the Mojave, and asked, “What are we supposed to do here?” I think that question became the project.

We’re not there because we already have answers. We’re there to spend enough time with a place that it begins to change us. We think of our work as field notes — fragments toward knowing. The field is as much a psychological space as a physical one, and every site visit reminds me that wonder begins when we admit we don’t yet know what we’re looking at.

Unseen California’s website splash page, August 2026.

YM:
Language Has No Weather (theretherenow, 2024) is Unseen California’s first opus. In the introduction you wrote, the road occupies a central place, acting both as a mode of transport and a filter that makes critical issues go by the wayside. On a personal level, tell us about your first sights and encounters with California’s shifting ecologies.

Cover of Language Has No Weather, Unseen California inaugural artist cohort’s photobook, printed (riso) and published by theretherenow (2024).

Spread in Language Has No Weather with Karolina Karlic’s work in Language Has No Weather (theretherenow, 2024).

KK:
I learned California through its roads, but I came to understand it by leaving them.

When I first moved to Santa Cruz, I spent hours driving Highway 101 and Highway 1. From the car, California unfolds as one spectacular view after another — coastlines, agriculture, forests, oil platforms, mountains. It’s easy to believe you’ve seen the landscape simply because you’ve passed through it.

Everything changed once I started returning to the same places. I began noticing what couldn’t be seen at highway speed: erosion after winter storms, animal tracks after a fire, fog slowly rolling across a hillside nurturing redwood trees, the quiet return of new growth.

The landscape stopped being scenery and became a teacher.

I realized that seeing isn’t about covering more ground. It’s about returning often enough that a place begins to reveal itself on its own terms.

YM:
In 2014, you started working on Rubberlands, in which you map the commodification of the Hevea tree and the environmental and social consequences of the global rubber industry. The series combines archival material with photographs made during fieldwork in Brazil. What role has the archive played in this project?

KK:
The archive taught me that photographs have long lives.

When I first began working with the Ford, Firestone, Goodyear, U.S. Rubber Company, and B.F. Goodrich archives, I wasn’t looking for historical illustrations. I wanted to understand how photography helped shape ideas about industry, how it connected information from one place to another, and how it documented a pivotal moment in globalization. Once I began working in Brazil with families, scientists, and communities who continue to live with the consequences of those histories, those images took on entirely new meanings.

Emilly Farias in the Michelin Rubber Groves, Michelin Rubber Plantation, Bahia, Brazil. Archival pigment print, 42 × 52 ½ in. © Karolina Karlic.

Sisters Ivna and Ingrid Souza Playing with Cousin Monick Farias in the Family Backyard with Squash Plants in the Foreground at Company Housing Complex Vila 4,
Michelin Rubber Plantation, Bahia, Brazil. Archival pigment print, 32 × 40 in. © Karolina Karlic.

The archive stopped feeling like the past. It became another landscape to walk through — one I could confront in the present and activate as part of a larger historical record.

Across all of my work, I’m interested in the forms human activity takes and their outcomes — whether that’s the automobile industry in Detroit, rubber plantations in Brazil, or post-fire landscapes in California. Photography allows me to trace those relationships across time, geography, and memory.

“Over time, I came to realize that photography wasn’t

simply documenting globalization—it was helping to build it.”

– Karolina Karlic

YM:
How can Lenscratch readers follow the evolution of Rubberlands?

KK:
Rubberlands has never felt like a project with an ending. Every return to the field, every visit to an archive, every conversation opens another question.

Hevea brasiliensis (Rubber Tree Graft in Plastic Bag No. 1 & No. 2), Michelin Rubber Plantation, Bahia, Brazil.
Diptych, archival pigment prints, 32 × 40 in. each. © Karolina Karlic.

Readers can follow the work through exhibitions and public talks, but after living with this project for more than a decade, I’ve realized that I owe it to the slower pace and intimacy of a book. Some projects ask for a gallery wall; Rubberlands asks for a publication — one that can hold its many histories, contradictions, and unanswered questions.

I’ve stopped thinking of projects as things to finish. I think of them as conversations I continue to have with the world. I hope the book becomes another place to return to — a space where readers can linger, make connections, and perhaps begin asking questions of their own.drive

YM:
You are a contributing author and faculty designer of the Environmental Art + Social Practice MFA program at UC Santa Cruz. Can you highlight a few recent student projects?

KK:
One of the great privileges of my career has been helping to shape the Environmental Art + Social Practice MFA at UC Santa Cruz alongside an extraordinary group of colleagues. I recently completed my term as the program’s Director of Graduate Studies, and one of the most rewarding parts of that experience has been working closely with artists as they develop practices rooted in relationships — with people, with place, and with the more-than-human world.

Geese Fly Over the Former Iron Gate Dam on the Klamath River, September 2024. © Jonas Banta.

Handprints at the Weitchpec Gas Station, December 2023. © Jonas Banta.

One recent graduate, Jonas Banta (MFA 2025), asks what Indigenous photography can become beyond correcting historical misrepresentation. His work follows salmon, rivers, and Indigenous knowledge across Alaska and California, proposing photography as a practice of kinship, responsibility, and cultural continuity.

We Gather the Rubble (Mounir), 2026. Rubble, printing gel on black paper.
Engineer Mounir Mabsout, Dima’s father, holds remains from bombed buildings in Beirut, during research on how to rebuild homes with the rubble. © Dima Mabsout.

Another graduate student, Dima Mabsout (MFA 2026), transforms rubble from bombed buildings in Lebanon into handmade pigments and layered photographs, tracing relationships between geology, language, memory, and rebuilding. It’s an extraordinary example of how material practice can hold grief while imagining repair.

The Greenhouse Project by L Gilbert and Dav Bell. See: https://www.instagram.com/_the_greenhouse_project_/

I’m also incredibly grateful for The Greenhouse Project, initiated by EASP graduates L. Gilbert (MFA 2023) and Dav Bell (MFA 2023). What began as artists building an open-air gathering space on the UCSC Farm has grown into a living seed library, seed storytelling circles, community meals, and collaborations with Indigenous seed keepers, farmers, artists, and researchers. It reminds me that some of the most meaningful works of art continue growing through the communities that care for them.

Students in UCSC Art Department’s Immersive Arts Field Research course, co-taught by Professors Karolina Karlic and Jonathan Jackson,
at the Sweeney Granite Mountains Desert Research Center, Mojave Desert, California, 2025. Photo © Karolina Karlic.

Teaching has made me a better artist because it keeps me learning. I often tell my students that I’m ten percent teacher and ninety percent student, and every year they expand my understanding of what art can be and who it can serve.

YM:
What does photographing in a warming world mean to you?

KK:
Photographing in a warming world has made me more comfortable with uncertainty.

Climate change doesn’t fit inside a single photograph. It unfolds across generations, seasons, migrations, extinctions, and slow transformations that often escape our attention.

Photography can’t solve that.

But it can teach us to slow down.

It reminds us that we’re not standing outside the landscape looking in — we’re already part of it. The older I get, the less I think photography begins with making images.

I think it begins with building relationships with people, with places, with history, and with the more-than-human world.

The photograph is simply the trace those relationships leave behind, a record of time shared with a place.

Artist bio of Karolina Karlic: Through a range of photographic media Karlic creates work that the intersection of photography and documentary practices, with a focus on systems of labor and industry, globalization, and their impact on the social and environmental landscapes. Karlic has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, residencies, and awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Cultural Exchange International Fellowship of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Fellowship, the Hellman Fellowship, the Sacatar Foundation Residency Program, and Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program, amongst others. Karlic’s photography has been published in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Aperture, Artforum, Juxtapoz Magazine, Society of Photographic Education, IMA Japanese Magazine, Marie Claire UK, and others.

Her research is dedicated to telling the stories of those persons and environs affected by the post-modernization of the industrial world. Through the use of documentary art practice as a research method rather than an artistic style, her work seeks to better understand societal, environmental, and industrial constructs by critically making visual notes of them. Karlic’s work invites viewers into a space where historical consciousness is critical to reflecting on our relationship to consumption by questioning photography’s limitations, engaging contemporary concerns around the social impact of art, and elaborating on the distinctions between art and lived experience.

In her research, Rubberlands, a photographic survey that maps the ways natural rubber manufacturing is socially, ecologically and systemically formed, Karlic proposes that rubber + photography are both integral components of the second phase of the industrial revolution. This research proposes that each are equal players in the development of a globalized contemporary mobile society of making and consuming.

Karolina Karlic is the founding director of, Unseen California, a research initiative that serves as a centralizing hub for arts+science+humanities research that aims to build upon and extend academic led arts research, education and student work in outdoor California classroom laboratories across the UC Natural Reserve System through an interdisciplinary arts approach to visualizing the environmental and social concerns of the California Landscape in the 21st Century. Unseen California is a site-specific research initiative for field-based arts research, teaching and learning, public programming, and the creation of artworks that address California’s cultural histories and ecological landscapes.

Academic roles of Karolina Karlic: University of California, Santa Cruz, Associate Professor Karolina Karlic is the inaugural Art + Science Director of the Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History.

In 2020 Karlic cofounded Unseen California, a multi-pronged arts research initiative utilizing the University of California Natural Reserve System (UC Nature) seeded by “PlaceMakers: UC Place-based Art + Design” MPRI planning grant.

Karlic is a contributing author and principal faculty of the UCSC Environmental Art + Social Practice MFA program that launched in 2021 and the UCSC Arts Division’s Creative Technologies online BA program the first of its kind at any UC campus launched in fall 2024.

Artist website: www.karolinakarlic.com/

Unseen California: www.unseencalifornia.com/

Instagram: @karolinakarlic

Artist bio of Yogan Muller: Yogan Muller is a French photographer, first-generation graduate, researcher, and educator. His work engages with ecological overshoot and its impact on landscapes, resources, and communities. Research, critical approaches to landscape, fieldwork, and design are central to his process. He works with photography, photogrammetry, drones, and the book form.

After the traumatic loss of his father in February 2022, belonging, identity, and fractured roots are themes that came to the fore. He sublimates his loss in JPM, an ongoing, manifold project which culminated in a book dummy he conceived, designed, and produced within Penumbra Foundation’s Long-Term Program (Photobooks) in 2024 and 2025. His JPM dummy has been shortlisted and exhibited at the LUMA Foundation during the 2025 Rencontres d’Arles, the 2026 Dummy Award (Photobook Museum, Cologne, Germany), and the 2026 Athens Photo Festival in Greece.

In October 2019, Yogan moved to Los Angeles to join the UCLA Design Media Arts (DMA) Counterforce Lab. He taught photography, photogrammetry, AI, and drones at UCLA DMA between 2020 and 2024. In November 2018, he graduated with one of the first practice-based PhDs in Photography from ENSAV La Cambre and Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.

His work is in the collections of Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), the Getty Museum (Los Angeles), and private collections.

Artist website: www.yogan-muller.com

Instagram: @yoganmuller