Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth: A series of photography prompts
Part of the programme around the Poisoned Futures exhibition
Activity Introduction
A series of photography prompts drawn from the book 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth (2021).
Inspired by the exhibition ‘Back to Earth’, held at the Serpentine in 2022, 140 Artists’ Ideas is a collection of DIY actions: short texts, images and drawings representing ‘an instruction, a recipe, a score or an offering for the Earth’.
Each of the artists, through their contribution, shares ‘ideas about how to shape a more ecological and equitable future’
Mulitpliability: ‘There is no such thing as a single solution to a problem as complex and multifaceted as the climate crisis’
140 Artists’ Ideas seeks to foster ‘a diversity of responses and experiences, and collaboration across disciplines’, shining a light on the ecological themes of multiplicity and interconnectedness.
Photography Prompt 1
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth (2021)
- Find a piece of ground: garden or pavement, woodland, field or jungle.
- Measure out 1 metre square – a ‘quadrat’ – with string or tape.
- Kneel down.
- List all of the living things you can see in the square.
- Imagine the organisms you can’t see.
- Think about the interrelationships between all these beings.
- Give them all names. Make up your own if you don’t know theirs.
- Now step inside the square.
- Think about your relationship with every being in the square with you.
- Do you feel big or small?
- Repeat on a different terrain.
Photography Prompt #1: Create and photograph a quadrat, what interrelationships does it reveal between living beings?
If you want to share your findings, tag us on social media (@hundreheroines) or send them to us via hello@hundredheroines.org
Also of Interest
In 2017, Claudia Märzendorfer was commissioned to photograph square metres of an alpine pasture for the exhibition Visions of Nature at the Kunsthaus, Vienna. Read more on her website.
** We have one of the posters and a copy of the exhibition catalogue in the museum **
