Becoming Terrestrial

2026 · Site-specific Performance · Photography · Moving Image · Ecology & Environmental Art

Becoming Terrestrial is a photographic and performative project developed on La Gomera in the Canary Islands, exploring the relationship between the human body, environment and nonhuman agency. The work continues my ongoing interest in perception, embodiment and how experience emerges through relations between bodies, technologies and environments.

The photographs were deliberately made between 12:00 and 14:00, treating time, solar intensity and the body’s exposure to environmental conditions as integral elements of the work. At the height of the day, the landscape becomes almost excessive: light flattens spatial relations, shadows contract, and the distinction between body, terrain and vegetation begins to dissolve. The human figure is no longer positioned as the central subject or observer, but becomes one element within a larger field of forces.

The choice of midday also carries a temporal and political dimension. We are no longer five to twelve. Noon has already passed. The work emerges from the condition of climate emergency, in which ecological transformation is no longer a distant future but an ongoing present. Yet the project does not adopt either a catastrophic or an optimistic position. Instead, it asks what forms of attention and agency remain possible once the conditions of the world have already changed.

La Gomera becomes more than a location: its volcanic geology, microclimates, vegetation and atmospheric conditions form part of the work’s material context. The landscape is not represented as a passive backdrop, but encountered as an active participant in the production of experience.

Becoming Terrestrial draws on Bruno Latour’s proposition that it is time to become terrestrial: not to retreat into an idealised notion of “nature”, but to learn how to exist as one participant among many within a shared, more-than-human world.

It is time to become terrestrial. Not to represent the more-than-human world, but to learn how to think, sense, and exist as one participant within it.

(video still)

technical description

year: 2026
site-specific performance and photography, moving image, which includes:
10 × archival pigment prints, 100 × 150 cm
2 × single-channel HD videos, loop, 5’00”