Flowers are giving up

Corals are fading under the stress, insects are disappearing, flowers are suppressing their attractiveness, all set in the background while people lose their ability to anchor themselves in reality. What else are we willing to give up? How far does the bottom of our recklessness extend? All of these processes are happening at incredible speed as a desperate effort to appeal for help, as an answer to the geopolitical developments of the last 50 years. 

The selection of photographs was taken in response to the rapid changes in nature. The main subject of my interest is the great decline of insects. Research has shown that flowers are giving up pollinators and evolving to be less attractive to them. They are evolving to self-pollinate, which would work in the short term, but may limit their ability to adapt to future environmental changes. Plants are undoing thousands of years of evolution in response to a phenomenon that has only existed for the last few decades. The black and white photographs of insects are appropriated materials - an old large collection of negatives edited by me that I found in an antique shop. The other shots were taken gradually and are my own.

Dancing Makes You As Happy As a 2073,35 Euro Pay Rise

Hominization began approximately fourteen million years ago; Apollo 11’s crew needed four days to travel to the Moon, and it takes eight minutes till the light from the Sun reaches the Earth. One eye blink equals ten thousand transactions on electronic financial markets, and fiber-optic data transmission over a 2,500-km-long route takes twelve milliseconds, which is one-third of the speed of light. How long does it take you to get rid of the dizziness from the speed at which you live?

The world nation powers are shifting capital back to the research and development of tools and equipment for space travel after fundamental budget cuts in the 1990s as a reverberation of the tragedy of Challenger. The game also has plenty of new players from the private sector. Otherwise pragmatic billionaires dream of their pompous funerals on Mars, one day in the distant future, because they’ll live almost forever thanks to genetic manipulation, cloning or regular infusions of youthful blood. Space exploration moved far beyond its naive natal phase of little ideological skirmishes or dreaming about interstellar civilizations and jumped right into a state of ferocious conquest easily corresponding with the highest era of colonial expansion. Non only is the Moon a necessary stopover destination for any kind of journey far, far away but applications of technologies and materials developed for space travel on Earth have limitless potential. From scratchproof glass; lightweight, high-storage batteries powering all our smartphones or electric cars, memory foam and fireproof fabric or GPS, originally developed and designed for smooth navigation in outer space. On the horizon of growing investments shines a vision of fully autonomous artificial intelligence, biometric sensors, art-traffic control as well as crop fertilizers and greenhouse LEDs adapted from systems now in development for establishing otherworldly agriculture. And beyond all that lies a realm of practically boundless mining of rare earth elements and colonies of Earth originating Martians, where one for sure won’t have to worry about taxes.

To be honest, the framework of the outer space is but a mental exercise allowing for a better understanding of our current conditions. Staring the Climate crisis. Before we start digging under the surface of the Moon or on Mars, the first steps will be mining operations in the deep ocean or the arctic circle for the first time accessible by heavy machinery due to receding icebergs. The Western colonial past plays the second violin. Before conceiving a functioning governing system in a future space colony comes an urgent need to reevaluate the history of western expansions and from it resulting in a blazing state of late capitalism.

Ines Karčáková was nominated to Futures Talents by Fotograf Zone in 2024. 

Co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union, FUTURES is a platform to increase the capacity, mobility and visibility of it's selected artists and to bridge the gap between emerging and established artists.

IMAGES CAPTIONS

1–8 | Ines Karčáková, Flowers are giving up, 2024
9–11 | Ines Karčáková, Dancing Makes You As Happy As a 2073,35 Euro Pay Rise, video, 2020