The biggest change is changing attitudes towards natural phenomena and our relationship to them. The fact that in various parts of the world rivers, mountains and other natural phenomena are being accorded legal standing (i.e. Ecuador, Peru, New Zealand) so that in future it will be possible to sue individuals or companies for damages on their behalf. In a world where, in the pursuit of profit, water companies can dump raw sewage in rivers and make beaches and sea bathing dangerous to health (England), where companies can openly apply for a licence to tear down a mountain and leave a heap of toxic rubble in their search for rare earths, or the Amazon polluted with mercury and arsenic in the search for gold, it is time natural entities were accorded the right to exist, to persist and to regenerate. To those who consider this a wholly novel and impractical idea, there is one very good counter-argument — if we can extend legal standing to non-persons in the form of corporations, it is past the time for us to accept the legal objections of an ocean, the appeal of a river, or an injunction in favour of a mountain. Which would be quite in keeping with the holistic idea of watery edges. *
Rio Odiel, halfway from the mine to Huelva.
TIM SHARP lives and works in Vienna. His photo and installation works explore the relationship between image and text; his films explore the mutability of the documentary assertion made by lens- based images. Recent work is concerned with the mechanisms and patterns of power involved in the (re)construction of historical, cultural and personal memory. https://www.timsharp.at
all images Tim Sharp
Rio Odiel.
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on site review 49 :: shorelines
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