Picturing the future‐conditional: montage and the global geographies of climate change

Abstract

A growing body of work has explored the effects of visual imagery on shifting forms of environmental consciousness and politics. Circulating images of, for example, the 'whole Earth' have been ascribed agency in the emergence of new forms of planetary awareness and political globalism. This essay identifies a new form of global environmental image, in the shape of photographic montage depictions of future places transformed by the effects of climate change. Montage enables artists and designers to import the spatial formations of distant places into more familiar locations, in the process producing novel renderings of the interconnections of global environmental change. The future-conditional -'if x, then y' -has become a key register of scientific and artistic engagement with climate change, and practices of visual montage have offered means of reconciling the transformations of space and time in the imagination of putative futures. The essay situates such images within a longer lineage of depictions of the tropical and the ruined, and focuses on contemporary montage depictions of climate-change-induced migration. It argues that many of these 'global montages' problematically reinforce extant notions of geographical otherness. Yet montage, as a technique, also renders visible the choices, cuts, juxtapositions and arguments which lie behind any representation, thus offering the seed of a more reflexive mode of future-conditional image-making.

Visualising Climate and Climate Change: A Longue Durée Perspective

“…It is no longer the colonial administrator who confronts himself to the dangers of the so-called torrid zone, or the explorer who ventures into the forbidding climes of the polar regions, equipped each time with ideas of stable climates and distinct zones, each attached to specific views on nature and society. Today, the situation is somewhat inversed, with the 'tropics' inviting themselves to 'us', as evidenced, for instance, in climate change exhibitions such as Postcards from the Future (London 2010) or in the recurrent use of the motif of glaciers and palm trees in the Swiss publishing context (Brönnimann 2002;Mahony 2016). Both examples reveal that mapping is only one of many visual strategies deployed, with montage being another key visual strategy used to visualise the mobility of climates.…”

“…There are, however, also important limits to these approaches. Indeed, as Mahony has convincingly argued, the fear of tropical invasion, as promoted in Postcards from the Future, comes with a highly typified view of the tropics 'neglecting a fuller politics of human mobility, urbanisation and the global interconnections through which human populations are jointly engaged in the ongoing composition of a common, climate-changed world' (Mahony 2016).…”

Visualising the global environmental: new research directions

“…Finally, the perceived dichotomy between the disengaging ‘global’ and the particular ‘local’ may itself be questioned in productive ways. As Mahony () shows in his essay on the use of photomontage in illustrating the speculative effects of global climate change on recognisable places, montage can provide an innovative and subversive approach to engaging with the complex geographies of climate change. At the same time, he emphasises, just like Schneider and Höhler, the importance of staying critical of the cultural variability of themes introduced – be it the world in ruins, mass migration of people, or climatic types.…”

“…The creation of blind spots is of course only one aspect of a broad range of political processes revealed by the essays. Others include processes of ‘typification’ in climate change photography by ‘offering only a simplistic, racialised politics of space’ (Mahony ), the use of colour in climate change images introducing an ‘aesthetics of fear’ (Schneider ), or the visual promotion of ‘beautiful’ landscapes and ‘perfect’ landforms for conservation policies (Regnauld and Limido ). In sum, since there is no unmediated access in knowing the global environment, many important lessons are to be learnt by engaging in a process of re‐politicisation of global environmental images.…”

Images, imagination and the global environment: towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on global environmental images

“…Until today, these fears have unfortunately stayed at the very top of the environmental agenda. As Mahony (forthcoming) points out, the somewhat common belief that in order to induce political action on climate change, we simply have to render carbon emission and global temperature accessible to the ‘naked eye’ just like the smog of Victorian London, is certainly problematic – and one might add, naive. To be sure, we clearly cannot do without visualisations because they constitute the only practical and efficient way to understand and communicate global environmental change, but we still need more research on why many global environmental icons, despite their high public visibility as dominant visual tropes, often show little impact on widespread political action or affective engagement (O'Neill and Hulme ; Doyle ).…”