dams simon shim sutcliffe
I was recently documenting the Leiden Rijksmuseum. In the central foyer is the temple of Taffeh, one of four Egyptian temples (the other three are at the Metropolitan in New York, the Parque del Oeste in Madrid, and the Museo Egizio in Turin) cut up and moved during the construction of the monolithic Aswan Dam in 1964 at the peak of the Cold War. Such dams are the remnants of the modern in our contemporary world. Last summer, in Georgia working with Propaganda.network, a residency group in Tbilis, I spent time at the protest encampments of the Rioni Valley Defenders, photos below , where local winegrowers were protesting the construction of what would be the largest hydro dam in the region to provide cheap power to bitcoin miners and factories. The dam was only recently cancelled. Despite large business interests and national government support, these massive concrete structures are no longer automatically faits accomplis . Existing dams are objective in their form and subjective in their content, they drown what's within and rise up what's beyond. They show the fragility of infrastructure and the fragility of nature. They are sites of national importance yet they are not considered as aesthetic sites. To judge and aestheticise them allows one to criticise and problematise them. To look at dams is to look at how a photograph makes a world, how the banal can go beyond just a motif or form, into universal structure. p
My project is to photograph universal structures which show the resilience of the human condition and the fragility of heroic and monumental engineering projects such as hydro-electric dams. In a postwar world, these large, often national infrastructure projects held the promise of a better future by providing a valuable, reliable source of power for industry, for cities and for citizens. Dams are often a country's most visible tools of control — the control of water becoming an ever increasing importance in climate crises. Canada has the highest dam capacity in the world with the majority built between 1945 and 1970. It was a period in which the promise of a better life was traded for the displacement of Indigenous Peoples, flora and fauna, and land. * This assortment of photographs of dams ranges from from 2016 until now, from Georgia to the United States, Switzerland to Scotland – photographic cuts in the cinematic river of time. Dams are lodged between the chance and uncertainty of the liquid and the determinacy of the mechanical. They destroy and create at the same time. They are an infrastructure which submerges both nature and human culture. They impose a global condition of twentieth-century modernity on the local and specific condition.
Gutami 1 HPP, Georgia
all images Simon Shim-Sutcliffe
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on site review 41 :: infrastructure
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