“By exploiting their natural resources and thereby permanently damaging their environment, the industrialized countries owe an enormous debt to the countries of the South. This ecological debt is much greater than the financial debt that the South supposedly owes to the North. Taking it into account would completely change the way we think about the global economy.”

Natalie Bachelez

The imposition of modernist/colonialist logic has led to an alienating and objectifying perception of nature. This abstracted view is rooted in a historical framework that has systematically enforced physical, ontological, and epistemological divisions between human beings and their natural environment across multiple levels.

Environmental Matrix of Power is an investigation materialized in a graphic diagram, banner, and poem that touches upon some of the historical narratives and systems behind our climate and social emergency. This circular timeline, which is also a matrix and a net, aims to critically review some of the hegemonic discourses built around nature and to reveal how the systems of the present are a direct effect of previous historical constructs. In highlighting one of the questions of the diagram—“What communities and landscapes sustain our current lifestyle?”—the eight-meter banner challenges pedestrians and drivers passing by the building.

Environmental Matrix of Power intends to reveal the incongruence of our current systems while making evident that there cannot be climate justice without social justice, that the struggle against climate change should go hand in hand with the struggle to decolonize our systems, and that the climate emergency should be tackled through borderless, intersectional planetary solidarity.

“Some parts of the planet have become unbearable for human life

in 2022 there were millions of new disasters full of strife

In the next 50 years the planet could see an increase in the fluctuations of weather,

larger than the one it has seen in the previous 6,000 years altogether

Drying lands becoming deserts, high tides and sea levels rising, critical water and air qualities, how do we engage with these realities?

An odd correlation takes place—those affected the worst

have contributed the least in making CO₂ emissions rise.”

Excerpt from “Oceans and Rivers to Blood Vessels and Streams. A Poem about Environmental Intersectionality,” Daniela Medina Poch, Eigenart Magazine.

EXHIBITED AT

fridays for future, documenta fifteen, Kassel, June, 2023 and Unter Druck Gesetzt: Daten und Statements Strukturelle Ausgrenzungen, Haus der Statistik, Berlin, April, 2021