Sumatran tiger © marten slothouwer
"What is it like to live in the age of the 6th mass extinction"?
This phenomenological question is the starting point of the long term photography project The Intimacy of Extinction.
In 2024, work of the Intimacy of Extinction was shown on the Mulhouse Photo Biennale and shortlisted for the Royal Photographic Society annual exhibition.
"What is it like to live in the age of the 6th mass extinction"?
The Intimacy of Extinction revolves around this phenomenological question. Phenomenology is about how we experience things, the world and ourselves within the world.
To make the question more concrete, I reduce the scope of the question to an actual, palpable thing, the nature reserve.
In a sense, the nature reserve is a concrete manifestation of the age of the 6th mass extinction.
On the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, a global biodiversity hotspot and a place renowned for its many critically endangered species, little forest is left outside a handful of forest reserves.
"What is it like to live in the age of the 6th mass extinction"?
Satellite imagery of Sumatra gives a clue.
image: NASA
Satellite imagery provides scientific data for all kind of purposes but also conveys emotions, it discloses meaning.
Looking at historical satellite imagery of Sumatra's forest cover is an unsettling, yet intriguing experience. As the forest disappears, the nature reserve appears. Decades of destruction has delineated the green patches on the map I’m familiar with today. Reading the satellite image is a spatiotemporal experience. Any meaning attributed to the nature reserve (i.e. as place of permanence and pureness) only exists within its spatiotemporal situatedness.
The intimacy of extinction is a photographic translation of the experience of the ‘outside’ satellite imagery into the affectual, intimate and grounded experience of ´the being there`.
“The intimate comes to be when the boundary is breached between an interiority and the outside”
Living-Off-Landscape, François Jullien, 2018
As I construe the scenery in front of me in accordance with the spatiotemporal context of the satellite image, the experience of nearness to the nature reserve discloses the world in which the reserve is situated..
…and in which the question is asked:
“What is it like to live in the age of the 6th mass extinction?”
inExtimacy III
inExtimacy:
is both a reference to the title Intimacy of Extinction as well as to Extimacy, a term coined by Lacan
(1901-1981) which questions the common distinction, the traditional duality, between exteriority and psychic interiority or intimacy.
about Marten Slothouwer
born in 1981 in Amsterdam
now living in Berlin
started long term photo project Intimacy of Extinction in 2019 in Sumatra after doing several years of media, research and conservation project in this part of the world.
contact: contact{at}martenslothouwer.com