Re-presenting land: A photographic critique of anthropocentrism and extractivism in Simryn Gill’s Eyes and Storms
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The Anthropocene—a term popularised by Paul Crutzen in his seminal article ‘Geology of Mankind’ (2002)—references the current epoch in which human activity has become the predominant drive of detrimental ecological change. The Anthropocene is now a thesis discussed across and within various fields and disciplines, and has recently been accompanied by a post-anthropocentric turn. This recognises the Anthropocene and ecological collapse as merely symptoms of a colonial-extractive anthropocentric hegemony, according to which the human species is unique, central, or superior. Now a widespread moral imperative, anthropocentrism has allowed humans to view the world as merely a standing reserve from which natural ‘resources’ are readily available for extraction, commodification, and human use. In order to attempt to re-position ourselves more sustainably in relation to the earth, a post-anthropocentric shift is essential in order to go beyond the reductionist perception of the superior position of the human to the non-human in the ‘broader ecological assemblage’ (Anderson 2015: 338).
This essay discusses Simryn Gill’s series of photographs Eyes and Storms and how these images respond to and challenge anthropocentrically structured powers, namely the extractive industries in the Pilbara region of north-western Australia. Informed by the knowledge systems of the Yindjibarndi people, whose ancestral lands reside in this region, and various scholars of post-anthropocentrism, the essay first outlines the way in which extractivism relies on anthropocentrism in order to function, and how contemporary art responds to these discussions. It goes on to argue that Eyes and Storms challenges anthropocentrism by testifying to the destruction that is otherwise peripheral to our awareness, and by representing land in a way that counters that of other anthropocentric visual imagery. Nonetheless, Eyes and Storms’ criticism of anthropocentrism is limited by its aestheticization of misery that arguably distances, commodifies, and instrumentalises the suffering of the land and Indigenous people.
While this conceptualisation of the Anthropocene allows for a widespread acknowledgment of anthropocentrism as the primary enabler of the hierarchical construction of power, it often blunts distinctions between the people, nations, and collectives who stimulate and engage with it, and those who directly bear the consequences. As Zoe Todd expresses in her article ‘Indigenizing the Anthropocene’, in the same way that we should see humans not as an abstract category, but as particular people divided often by wealth, geography, and colonialism, we should not engage with the Anthropocene as a ‘teleological fact implicating all humans as equally culpable for the current socio-economic and ecological state of the world’ (Todd 2015: 252), and it is thus essential to remain conscious of and critical about one’s positionality.
When contemporary Western science, humanities, and art visualise a post-anthropocentric way of being, they often make use of Indigenous values, lifestyles, and relationships with the living, with time, with progress, and with knowledge. However, these very fields impose disruption, discrimination, and displacement on Indigenous communities, considering their non-Eurocentric knowledges and lands as ‘third world’, ‘undeveloped’, and ‘nonhuman’. While Indigenous community’s knowledge system differs, many share a conception of nature as system that is whole and living and an understanding of the reciprocal relationship between the individual and the land, as opposed to the traditional Western classification of life in terms of ranking or hierarchies. These Indigenous private and communal cycles of knowledge have been reiterated and reinforced through generations of lived experience. Although increasingly valued and accepted amid the current scientific understanding of the interrelation of all life, the ideas and experiences of Indigenous and marginalised communities are often obscured by non-Indigenous practitioners; just like land and its contents, knowledge becomes extracted when regarded as resourceful and beneficial for those in a position of power.
As non-Indigenous practitioners increasingly incorporate and learn from these Indigenous long-silenced alternate knowledge systems in order to perceive nonhuman lives and humanity’s relation to them otherwise, this must be done carefully and respectfully. Non-Indigenous works of art, writing, and research which reappropriate Indigenous worldviews must ethically bring Indigenous beliefs and practices to the fore. One way this can be achieved is through a practice of ‘speaking nearby’, as conceived by Trinh T. Minh-ha, a speaking that does not assume the place of any person, but instead ‘reflects on itself, and comes close to a subject without seizing or claiming it’ (Chen 1992: 87). Non-Indigenous practitioners and academics must acknowledge that Indigenous knowledges derive from lived experience that otherwise cannot be fully understood, and must recognise that while creating artwork and discussing theories that respond to anthropocentrism may help to deconstruct it, the destruction and violence that its systems impose is deeply devastating to many lives and must not be abstracted or intellectualised.
‘Industrial mining opens up a material and historical fracture; it creates a break in landscapes and their rhythms of life that is inevitably violent’ (Acosta, I., Purbrick, L., and Ribas, X. 2020: 4); so begins the arts research collective Traces of Nitrate’s account of extractivism, the intensive and industrial hyper-exploitation, removal, or exhaustion of natural materials from the earth, resulting in substantial change to social and ecological life. ‘The Earth's surface is shattered in order to reach the rocks beneath and the minerals they contain,’ they declare; ‘[d]isplacement follows. All is irreversible. The material that is removed is never returned’ (ibid.). It is evident that this testimony considers extractivism as situated in and inseparable from the hegemonic frameworks of anthropocentrism, imperial adventurism, colonialist globalism, and neoliberal capitalism; all involve the pursuit of constant control, expansion, development, and material gain by virtue of the objectification and exploitation of a disempowered Other. According to Macarena Gómez-Barris, since the colonial rupture, ecologies and indigenous labour have been absorbed into an ideology that views ‘humanity as European’ and subsumes the natural surround and non-European bodies ‘to the realm of the inhuman Other’ (Gómez-Barris 2016: 29). As Gómez-Barris also identifies,‘[s]tate and corporate-designed mega-development projects operate through an economic rationale without calibrating for the lifeforms that exist beneath the gaze of such grand schemes’; under the logic of the Anthropocene, nature is instrumentalised and refused a right until detached from its source and reduced to a commodity.
While contributing greatly to European prosperity, extractivism results in severe negative consequences on local livelihoods and the environment; extractivism, and the discriminatory legislation and lack of care that it accompanies, perpetuates socio-economic inequalities, resulting in the disproportionate impact of extractivism on rural and Indigenous communities, and it could be said that this extraction of nature is one of the ways that the ‘founding violence of the state’ has been ‘reproduced continuously through time’ (Taussig 2013: 241). For example, iron has been extracted for the last seventy years from the rich iron ore mines of the Pilbara region, in north-western Australia, a nation that was founded on an originary violence against the Indigenous people. The current poverty, social disadvantage, political powerlessness, and ecological crisis in which the Yindjibarndi people currently find themselves is directly caused by extractivist interests who have methodically interfered with the cycles of knowledge which comprise the Indigenous Yindjibarndi culture. This mines of this region are the largest exporters of iron ore in the world, generating vast profits at least for their largely overseas owners—at least for the next fifty years, after which the mines will be exhausted. A strange term, exhausted, ‘as if the mines were human or at least alive’ (Taussig 2013: 238).
Systems in the global north are largely embedded in and benefit from extractivist economies and the very substances which are being plundered from the earth, and in that sense engage daily with the objectification and domination over nature and the oppression of Indigenous lives. Yet these processes have provided resources that have advanced science and technology; this essay was written, and is likely being read, on a computer which requires copper, and, with regards to photography, film photography and digital cameras require sodium nitrate and lithium respectively. Extractivism is thus also accounts for the process by which nature becomes politicised when it is transformed from a natural substance to a ‘resource’ that has the potential to enter a market.
Since the turn of the century, there has been an increasing re-assertion of art and creative practices’ capacity to resist forms of economic, political, and ideological domination, and their ability to mobilize counterhegemonic narratives. As the unsustainability of Western ontologies, epistemologies, and practices are revealed, innumerable contemporary artists have been contributing towards post-anthropocentric discussions by offering alternative socialities and economies that are ecological and ethical. In her book Creating Worlds Otherwise: Art, Collective Action, and (Post)Extractivism (2022), Paula Serafini demonstrates how art can be used to critique, challenge, and offer alternatives to anthropocentric and extractivist hegemonies. She employs a framework that consists of five functions of art in responding to these systems: denunciation, documentation, democratisation, deconstruction, and design; artworks that ‘deconstruct’ extractivist economies invite their public to reconsider the development of science, technology, and socio-political structures that have been homogenised in the Anthropocene. Creative projects that ‘democratise’ and ‘design’ a post-anthropocentric reality engage in radical imaginings to activate prefigurative ways of living. Through their work, artists also ‘document’ and ‘denounce’ anthropocentric and extractivist hegemonies in the absence of other platforms, making known the dire realities of communities and ecologies affected by the material processes of extractivism in a way which the mainstream media is unable, and often unwilling, to faithfully convey.
One artist whose practice engages with these ideas is Simryn Gill. Her series Eyes and Storms (2012) depicts, in aerial photographs, a panorama of the Pilbara region in north-western Australia. From this elevation, the man-made waterholes and open-pit mines appear as gaping wounds, the land as a brutally lacerated skin. Despite their subjects’ haunting stillness, the photographs maintain a sense of motion and intimate closeness to the land, as Gill soars ‘like a lost angel’ above the apocalypse of the Anthropocene (Taussig 2013: 239). As it documents the land in ruins, Eyes and Storms perhaps raises the question: how could the land be slaughtered if it were never alive? The sheer extremity of wealth that emerges from these ruins cannot be overlooked, and only augments their uncanny aesthetic character. Despite the terrible violence that they depict, however, the photographs somehow seduce the viewer as much as they repel; the gargantuan size and depth of the pits is disturbingly sublime, ‘as if a giant the size of the nation has been playing in a sand pit, carving erotic shapes and sacred signatures in the face of the planet Earth’ (Taussig 2013: 238), and the taxonomy of geometric shapes and sombre tones of the landscapes are equally magnetic. Eyes and Storms 7, for example, depicts the scarred surface of a mine from which iron ore is extracted. It bleeds a palette of rusty orange, pearlescent grey, eggshell blue, milk white, and inky liquid black, incandescent and glittering like drops of tears.
Much of the current post-anthropocentric discourse is strongly heroic, affirmative, and masculinist in how it simulates immediacy between problem and solution. This perception of the Anthropocene as a state of ‘romanticised ruin that will be easily “saved”’ (Anderson 2015: 340) only re-asserts an attitude of human dominance over the planet. How could we then respond ethically to the systemic brutality of anthropocentric practices without contributing to such narratives, but without remaining passive? What could we do when ‘apparently nothing can be done, and doing nothing is not an option?’ (Taylor 2020: 2). Simryn Gill’s photographs are an example of visual art which allows for an alternate perception of the world through a thoughtful and persistent witnessing; rather than attempting to intervene, Eyes and Storms silently and critically observes and indicts. By repeatedly documenting and laying bare the ruinous scenes of extractivism, photograph after photograph, Eyes and Storms acts as a militant declaration of presence as process—perhaps even of presence as protest. Gill’s environmental attentiveness and commitment to a sustained witnessing of the Pilbara mining sites manifests in these images, creating an affective testimonial space that acknowledges and denounces the destruction imposed by anthropocentric systems of power, harm that may not be undone but must be sincerely recognised.
Eyes and Storms’ striking visual testimony, moreover, serves as an archive of the violations to the land by extractivism, preventing this case from sinking into permanent invisibility. Despite the extent to which the Western population is embedded in the extractivist economy and benefits from the economic inequalities that it produces, its effects remain peripheral to the awareness of the public. This lack of human presence extends to the locus of the anthropogenic environmental damage itself, as the scenes of iron ore extraction in Eyes and Storms are devoid of people; far from prying eyes, mining corporations employ driverless trucks, autonomous trains, and small surveying drones to re-sculpt the land, completing this scene of apocalyptic sterility. By displaying these photographs as large-scale, 125-centimetre by 125-centimetre prints, Gill seemingly parodies the sense of anthropocentric triumph involved in this domination over nature. But her representation of the land on this scale also gives it a brazen physical presence to Western audiences, to whom anthropocentrism is seen as a norm. Eyes and Storms thus exposes, demands witnesses to, and consequently opens up discourses about the destruction that anthropocentrism imposes through both sincere and satirical interpretations of its display.
Eyes and Storms further challenges anthropocentrism through its counter-representation of land to that advanced by anthropocentric systems of extractivism. Landscape, according to cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove, emerged contemporary to capitalist accumulation (Cosgrove 1998). In this regard, the landscape form is a way of seeing that ‘represents a historically specific way of experiencing the world’ (ibid.: 15) that is anthropocentric, bourgeois, and individualist, bestowing upon the Western human subject the power to command surrounding space, and thus rendering the land—and those inhabiting it—the ‘object of an outside beholder’s aesthetic experience or technical expertise’ (Andermann 2023: 8). In this sense, landscapes were, and still are, a capitalist-colonial apparatus of extraction. Though first emerging in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century in the form of oil paintings, a contemporary revival of landscaping can be seen in the aerial perspectives of mining corporations, who employ satellite digital technologies to survey, photograph, and map territories as natural resources. Rather than using this perspective to engage in the objectification and ‘management of nature from above’ (Gomez-Barris 2016: 29), it could be argued that Eyes and Storms stages a different kind of landscaping, one that reappropriates the distanced aerial viewpoint of extractivism to instead resist anthropocentric representations of land. The affective charge of the photographs regalvanises and reimbues its viewers with a sense of humility, awe, and connectedness in relation to land. Eyes and Storms, in turn, recasts ‘nonhuman lives and earthly matter as coagents’, rather than merely objectified commodities, resources, or ‘material of aesthetic experience’ (Andermann 2023: 14). In this sense, Gill’s image rupture the anthropocentric viewpoint of extractivism that detaches us from the natural world, thus deconstructing extractivist perceptions and challenging the position of the non-human in the Anthropocene.
It could be argued, however, that these photographs’ critique of anthropocentrism is limited by the aesthetic distance that they create between the viewer and anthropogenic environmental damage. Although Gill’s aerial images do indeed denounce traditional forms of landscape and the extractive gaze that they impose, Eyes and Storms perpetuates that very distancing between the photographer and the subject, the human and the natural. Despite ostensibly challenging the objectification and commodification of the land, Gill’s photographs are nonetheless an act of externalisation; by seeing and thinking about environmental damage as the “subject” of a work of art, is it not ‘still caught in an idea of “external nature” as experienced by a human subject’, positing nature as an ontologically autonomous domain ‘and, we might add, a source of aesthetic pleasure?’ (Andermann 2023: 17). Indeed, the physical distance arguably beautifies of the land and the misery of Indigenous communities affected by it, rendering it pleasant for spectatorial human consumption, and thus suitable for commodification and commercialisation, as the prints are displayed in institutional art spaces and sold to collectors and clients. In response to this difficulty, post-extractivist artists and researchers have recently begun to assume submerged positions, allowing them to ‘see local knowledges that resides within what power has constituted extractive zones’ (Gómez-Barris 2017: 11). These submerged perspectives reveal countervisualities that are ‘random, complex, and […] often illegible’ to extractive powers that ‘assume simplicity where complexity actually dwells’ (Gómez-Barris 2017: xvi).
Ultimately, Eyes and Storms offers a poignant photographic critique of anthropocentrism and extractivism, prompting Western audiences to reconsider their perception of the non-human and their relationship the extracted materials that they consume. In doing so, Eyes and Storms emphasises the importance of acknowledging and amplifying Indigenous knowledge systems in the pursuit of more sustainable futures. While the photographs denounce traditional representations of land and provoke critical reflection on our relationship with the environment, they also evoke questions about the ethical complexities inherent in instrumentalising art to confront systemic issues, and what it means when the affective powers of the aesthetic become subservient to socio-political action.
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