“Slow Violence (Gospers Mountain, South Coast, Eastern Victoria, Orroral Valley)” by Anna Madeleine Raupach


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    Slow Violence (Gospers Mountain, South Coast, Eastern Victoria, Orroral Valley)

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Artist Statement:


    The Slow Violence series depicts maps of Australia’s 2019/2020 Black Summer bushfires in the Blue Mountains, the South Coast of NSW, Namadgi National Park, and Eastern Victoria, embroidered into emergency thermal blankets.

    These pieces compile satellite imagery gathered from emergency service applications, the Google Earth Engine Burnt Area Map, and state and national open-source datasets of fire damage to vegetation. The resulting shapes combine scientific and personal resources and aesthetics to interpret extreme weather events through a materialisation of data. Designed to retain body heat and as a potential signaling device, the thermal blanket conveys fire as both restorative and catastrophic and the slow technique of stitching encompasses a repetitive and meditative practice that simultaneously destroys and repairs this grounding substrate.

    The term ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011) refers to invisible implications of climate change that are temporally and spatially removed from sites of immediate destruction. In these works, the accumulated time and labour of individual actions dissolve to envelop the viewer in vibrant pattern as satellite imagery converges with a human scale. Through a tactile exploration of temporality and scale, they interweave personal experience and planetary forces to express a crisis both urgently present and crucially delayed.

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