Christo "Trees" and Richard Mosse "Broken Spectre": Geneva

CHRISTO (1935-2020)

Christo as ever was prescient in his focus given that trees, our respect and reliance on them is becoming increasingly critical to our existence. By inhibiting vision Christo forces onlookers to look again at what is obscured and taken for granted. The temporary inconvenience of not seeing fully a monument, bridge or tree, not only draws awareness, but paradoxically reveals details – size, height, relationship to surroundings and, in the case of trees, fully appreciate their crucial role as the lungs of the Earth.

Trees feature throughout Christo’s career; he regarded them as natural masters of all the arts. He first wrapped uprooted trees in 1966, and it would take another 32 years to wrap trees in nature with Wrapped Trees (Project for the Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park, Riehen, Switzerland). Renowned for large, visually impressive, and controversial wrapping of large landmarks or landscape features, Christo, and his wife Jeanne-Claude’s projects included the Wrapped Reichstag (1971-1995), Running Fence (1972-76) in California and The Mastaba (1977-ongoing). These projects took years of meticulous preparation. Refusing grants, donations or public money, the drawings, collages and models all financed the projects, and explored technical and aesthetic solutions, which aided political negotiation and environmental approval.

RICHARD MOSSE (b.1980)
As climate change exists outside human perception Richard Mosse aims to direct our eyes also to the environment and trees which wrap the earth, and in his case, to see how they are rapidly diminishing due to deforestation of the Amazon. He wishes to implicate the viewer in the drastic sights he reveals. By expanding vision through using surveillance technologies Mosse pushes the limits of photography to bring the realities of climate change into vivid focus. He reveals both the mundane operations of deforestation and the catastrophic effects of industrialisation.

“We can’t see the climate changing, and that’s really the inherent problem.” says Mosse, “It’s on a scale beyond what we can perceive. My power, if I have any, is to be able to show you the things that I’ve seen in a more powerful way than perhaps the pictures you’ve seen in the newspaper of the same thing.”

As a conceptual, documentary photographer, Mosse, has recorded and exposed many forms of human destruction. From covering post-war Balkan nations, the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the refugee crisis in Europe and environmental crimes in the Amazon rainforest, he has subverted the medium of photography and created a unique interrogatory medium consisting of infra-red film and orthographic software processed using GIS (geographic information systems) techniques. The result are highly detailed topographical images which reveal ecological complexities – geopolitical, multinational, local and cultural. Mosse won the coveted Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2014, and the prestigious Prix Pictet in 2017.