Look out
2021

Black swans are rare, unforeseeable events whose occurrence has profound and exceptional consequences. The September 11 attacks and the collapse of the Soviet Union are black swans. The pandemic and the ecological crisis are not. Both were as foreseeable as our collective blindness.

During the COVID lockdown, I obtained special permission to go out at night in Athens to photograph the deserted city. Alone in the streets, I felt imprisoned outside, wandering through a post apocalyptic nightmare that echoed the very apocalypse we continue to deny despite the findings of the IPCC. I believed I was documenting the pandemic. I was responding to an extraordinary moment, conducting a fictional investigation into humanity’s imagined self destruction. Only later did I realise that I had been walking among signs that were not black swans at all, but unmistakably visible warnings of what lies ahead.

In the darkness, while an entire planet kept its eyes closed, I wandered among statues and ruins. Each burst of flash seemed to reveal the stigmata of our own extinction. Athens had become an archaeological site of the present. I walked through the remnants of an abruptly abandoned everyday life, recalling the silent streets of Pompeii, surrounded by landscapes that belonged as much to memory as to the cinema that has shaped my imagination: La Jetée (Chris Marker), 12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam), The Road (John Hillcoat) and Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols).

At first, I thought I was exploring the idea of the ghost city. Yet what ghost could be more unsettling than that of the future itself?

“This report (the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report) should send chills down the spine of anyone who reads it. It shows where we are and where climate change is taking us: into a hole that we continue to dig deeper.”
Dave Reay, climatologist.