Flight

Zindzi Zwietering

In Flight (Vlucht), Zindzi Zwietering investigates how people prepare for a climate disaster. She followed so-called climate preppers in their search for safety in a time when natural disasters in The Netherlands follow each other in rapid succession. She immersed herself in the world of these meticulous preparations, in which people are eagerly looking for the certainty of survival, thanks to the right resources. Zindzi Zwietering looks at these preparations as a ritual; a way to give action to climate fear. At the same time, it is a political movement: an indictment of the capitalism that threatens to destroy our earth. Paradoxically, the market with goods that offer protection against climate catastrophes contributes to this.

Zwietering casts this message in the form of a series of five still lifes, which together form one large vanitas artwork that urges us to think about our transience. This makes Flight a photographic reference to classical painting, in which people have been trying to depict the transience of human life with skulls, rotting fruit and extinguished candles for years. The result is a work that makes our growing climate fear tangible.

"An interesting world and an intriguing field of research that leads to beautiful aesthetic work, with an original angle."

• the jury of If Things Grow Wrong