Successful AER resident, Daniel Ginsburg, shares letter of motivation for JOYA: arte + ecología residency
- Written byPost-Grad Community
- Published date 16 March 2022
Share story
Daniel Ginsburg, MA Photography alumni at London College of Communications has been selected for the AER residency at JOYA: arte + ecología, a stimulating and contemplative environment for international artists and writers
Set up by Professor Lucy Orta UAL Chair of Art for the Environment - Centre for Sustainable Fashion in 2015, The Art for the Environment International Artist Residency Programme (AER) provides UAL graduates with the exceptional opportunity to apply for short residencies at one of our internationally renowned host institutions, to explore concerns that define the 21st century – biodiversity, environmental sustainability, social economy, and human rights.
Read Daniel's successful proposal
My practice attempts to explore and challenge the boundaries of photography as an anthropocentric medium by using it to explore multispecies worlds and to encompass nonhuman agencies. By combining lens-based and camera-less photography, I use photography to explore the diversity of beings and their ontologies. Currently, my focus is on vegetal and fungal life. By weaving textual narratives into my image-based work, I explore personal and fictional relationships with and within these unnoticed worlds.
My most recent project, Under Everything, was inspired by a heightened awareness of the power of unchecked nature during the first UK lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as being a way to handle my rising climate anxiety. I explored the boundaries between nature and the urban spaces we are increasingly coming to inhabit. By integrating plant material into the post-developing process I wanted to lend these plants, which society deems to call weeds, a biosemiotic voice through images that was both haunting and unknowable. Either visions of a possible future or ghosts of a damaged present, I hoped for them to be noticed and to challenge their own extinction in an age of rapid biodiversity loss, and to show themselves as complex beings in this time of plant-blindness.
I was also able to explore through prose and poetry the human anger and climate grief that comes with allowing oneself to love that which is doomed. It is as much an acceptance of grief as a call to action.
Living through an era where it feels increasingly as if we are on the tipping point into climate disaster, with no hope of return, I am constantly surprised by how little urgency society, world governments, and even fellow artists seem to be showing towards the climate crisis. Though the solution is multi-faceted, much climate change art seems either pedagogical or overtly political, two things which are often likely to switch opposed or apathetic parties off. Though necessary, and I still incorporate these into my work, I care more about the spiritual damage that a separation from nature will have on us, which is much of my work borrows a lot from recent psychological and scientific sources. I believe that awareness of the psychological and spiritual effect that a separation from nature will have on ourselves and on future generations is a terrifying yet fascinating area of study. I’m inspired by Donna Haraway’s concept of becoming a ‘Speaker for the Dead’ in an era of extinction, so that those species who will go away will be remembered and not have their lessons, which we’ve only begun to parse through scientific and spiritual connections, be lost to time.
If accepted to the residency at Joya, I would explore the ways in which a more sustainable photographic practice can affect the way I respond to my environment. Much of my work employs sustainability where possible, for example using sustainable developer and printing methods, but more in-depth sustainable darkroom practices are unfamiliar to me, and I would love to integrate them into my work. I would also like to employ a more narrative heavy work to describe my experience in living sustainably and the affects this has on my animal self, my spiritual self, and myself as a multitude.
I would look closely at the vegetation unique to Almeria and explore the ways in which unfamiliarity to a landscape affects one’s belonging, and interactions with it. By incorporating plants and natural materials from the local environment into the development process, I will create images through a collaboration with the place itself. Though my previous work has been led by a sense of haunting and hopelessness in the face of the climate crisis, I’d like to explore visions of joy and possibility – of solarpunk over solastalgia – to explore potentialities of future flourishing and stability. In order to do this my research will interweave the history and the possible futures of Joya, along with cultural and natural vegetal histories and futures, breathed into narratives as text or spoken word alongside my images in an attempt to bring the beings and microcosms of the environment to life.
I think this will be an enriching opportunity to allow myself to be slower and more mindful about my practice, and a unique opportunity to open myself to inspiration from the environment.
Related links
UAL Post-Grad Community
Established in 2013, Post-Grad Community is an inclusive platform for all UAL postgraduate students to share work, find opportunities and connect with other creatives within the UAL and beyond. Find out more