Once We Were Here

I consider myself privileged: I am white, male, educated, healthy, living in the Western world. I am, however, part of a ‘disenchanted generation’: born after WWII when globalization seemed like a great idea, a path towards one big happy family, only to be awaken to a hard reality of inequality and environmental abuse. Nowadays hardly a day goes by without some depressing and alarming news: ice melting, fresh water contamination, over population, corporate greed, food poisoning, oil dependency, wealth inequality, the list goes on. It seems the world lost it’s mystery to become the playground of the very few at the expense of the rest. The resulting sense of powerlessness has left us disenfranchised, resulting in a lack of social or environmental accountability. But is this really the only way? Do we really need to follow this dead-end path? Presented here are ‘official’ documents, the focus of which are human artifacts in the environment: what are they? What is their function? Do they exist within or against the surrounding nature? While presented as an hypothetical archeology of the failed ideology of the conquest of nature, it is my hope that we can still assume both global and individual responsibility, that we can still change our path forward.