Dreaming in the Anthropocene / Chris Corson-Scott

Quote

Sometimes knowledge is paralysing, like the idea that even if all carbon emissions miraculously dropped to zero tomorrow, an unavoidable 2°C global temperature rise is already locked in—enough to trigger runaway climate change. Your small town is slowly drained of everything that once brought it to life, & sometimes things are so hopeless you can’t even manage to be hopeless.

About

A collaboration between photographer Chris Corson-Scott and poet Chris Holdaway. Intense photographs, lyrical essay, and elegiac poetry combine to chart the artists’ trek through fading dreams of New Zealand’s industrial heritage. Human material endeavours threaten to send the planet into an uninhabitable death-spiral; manufacturing towns once bustling with life are discarded like the consumer goods they once produced—: “Far from an enlightened response to material exploitation, our unimaginative flight from former rural centres & industrial towns is in fact the same inability to conceive an adequate response to climate change & the Anthropocene.”

This book was produced to accompany the exhibition Dreaming in the Anthropocene, which ran at Trish Clark Gallery, June 13–July 29, 2017.