BATTLE SPONGE: The complexities of land use

Friday 3 July 2015

The complexities of land use

Food painting / sugar mountains / cocoa trees and tea harvesters / too many paper coffee cups / too many coffee shops and nobody cares why

all our demands are met so far away

The world's priorities are etched onto the borders of the Amazon with geometric precision

The line divides the world's most productive soya field from the world's greatest carbon sink

keepsake vines and forest shrines

what should have stayed intact and raw is now adorned with decorations, pictures of home to make us feel satisfied and fresh. We fantasise about dense jungles and fruitful foliage and print patterns of it onto the Primark cotton, actually we make people in the places where those patterns originate form print it, and sew it. We cover forest products with pictures of other forest products.

Shrine to the past forest

Conjured representations of what we wished was still here line the way, Majestic trees.

Mountains of what we've cultivated lie at the bottom of it all.

Postcards of local and indigenous communities and what the colonisers and conquistadors made them do. POSTCARDS!?!? it's not a holiday!

Soil erosion (land degradation) occurs from floods and melts (ice cubes in Starbucks coffee cups made from forest pulp)

A projection of a forest walk plays on the shrine, catching the layers and vines that obstruct its beam:

the layers of social and cultural and natural history within that forest.

Here, now, we can ponder on the choice we still have; we can feel the peace of the forest and prevent it form disappearing forever, or we can let it diminish and all we'll have left are 'monuments' to it's impermanence (our streets littered with pulp and paper packaging and endless cups of coffee - ephemera. Monuments are meant to be permanent. These aren't. But the effect of their realm is; the realm of consumerism).

The fleetingness of first world excess vs. the longevity of impact from destroying a forest.