The Affordances of Precarity: In Conversation with Arko Datto
The precarity of life in the face of climate change amplifies the experience of living in a time of crisis. It involves navigating constant uncertainty and vulnerability, with communities on the frontlines of a war beyond their ken, grappling with rising sea levels, extreme weather events and resource scarcity, which threaten their livelihoods, wellbeing and survival. Shunyo Raja (Kings of a Bereft Land) is a three-part photographic series by Arko Datto that highlights the immensities of climate change in the world’s largest delta spread across Eastern India and Bangladesh, known as the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna Delta. The work depicts the intertwined lives of communities inhabiting the area, their relationships with the rapidly mutating landscape and the lacunae that mark the undocumented reality of climate change.
With three visually distinct chapters, Datto opens up the landscape as a site of concern and conflict, confronting uncontrollable waves of change and environmental disintegration. Conflict appears as a spectral presence governing the dynamic between humans and the environment, between sustained relationships and the unpredictability of life at the end of the world. In the eponymously titled first chapter, Datto’s portraits bring his subjects into a direct conversation with his camera. With its “formal documentary approach”, this set of photographs frames moments in the daytime and offers a clear, more straightforward study of the landscape, its abiding pulse driven by the people who inhabit it.
The second chapter, Where Do We Go When the Final Wave Hits presents an oppositionality in image form, delving into the depths of chaos that nighttime brings—a time when the wave quite literally hits—describing in part the erratic nature of life and loss on the shore and illuminating the psychological effects of both continuing and impending disasters. The wetness is ever present and obvious with torrential rain, crashing waves and bodies desperately seeking shelter, lit by Datto’s use of flash photography to convey the textures of a dystopic imagination.
In the final chapter, Terra Mutata, Datto deploys wartime vocabulary along with a full-spectrum and infrared camera to imply loss and transformation as the land and its inhabitants struggle to stay afloat. The scale of architecture occupies the foreground in this chapter, with desolate buildings and slowly sinking structures marking the devastation witnessed by the land and its people. In certain images, one also notices the juxtaposition of agential bodies against their former homes, a contrast further exacerbated by the unending precarity of both.
Arko Datto explores forced migration, techno-fascism, surveillance in the digital panopticon, disappearing islands, nocturnal realms and the psychosomatic stress of captive animals in his practice. His subjects vary, but together they form threads of inquiry into the existential dilemmas of our times. By incorporating and developing diverse visual languages, narratives, and styles, Datto pushes the boundaries of both still and moving images. His long-term personal projects and commissions are published in TIME, National Geographic, The Atlantic and The New Yorker among others. He has published three photo books: Pik-Nik (Editions Le bec en l’air, 2018), Will My Mannequin Be Home When I Return? (Edizioni L’artiere, 2018) and Snakefire (Edizioni L’artiere, 2021). On display at Light Work in Syracuse, New York and the Fotomuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands, Shunyo Raja moves beyond the spectacular nature of breaking news, showcasing instead a complex longevity afforded by the image as it records the transience of a rapidly worsening crisis.
(Featured image: Installation view of Shunyo Raja [Kings of a Bereft Land] at the Fotomuseum Den Haag.)
This conversation was recorded on 8 May 2023.
To learn more about Arko Datto’s practice, revisit his conversation with Sukanya Baskar where he discusses his projects Dinos of Hindustan and Captive Cams.
All images courtesy of the artist and Daylight Blue Media.
