Alta Buden

Grant awarded Fall 2016

Altabuden.com

I am so grateful to have received a Kossak Travel fellowship to travel to the Republic of Maldives for January of 2017.  I was able to travel across the globe (30 hrs of flight time) to this incredible and remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean that I otherwise would not have been able to experience. I visited these islands to further a body of work I am developing that focuses on our relationship to water and time, explored through a form of indexical landscape painting I have developed using photosensitive ink.

The water’s edges – intertidal zones, lakeshores, riverbanks – contain evidence of time. When nothing rests long enough to take root, bare space is left for histories to emerge. The flat water horizon can bring a feeling of unrealized potential, of the future. Tales are told by objects at the water’s edge, in the shapes of rocks worn down by eons, or freshly cracked and jagged. The flotsam washed up tells it’s own stories, each unique to a place on earth. The Maldives archipelago is the world’s lowest country, making it’s flotsam especially unique. Due to rising sea levels, there is a chance that within the next 20-30 years the entire country will be underwater, displacing it’s 400,000 natives. The islands are home to a myriad of species and cultures and I was able to spend time walking around them and creating indexical paintings.

My experience in the Maldives was indescribably fantastic and paradoxical. I will simply say that I was able to make lasting friends who I am still in touch with today. The people I met opened up the country to me, literally taking me everywhere, into homes and factories, uninhabited islands, the jail island, the trash island, abandoned British air force bases, fishing. I met government officials and journalists who described in detail the recent political turmoil and the incredible problems faced by the people there, I snorkeled on the most spectacular coral reefs I have ever seen. Having never spent time in a Muslim country, I was totally floored by both the differences and similarities in our cultures.

I arrived with the idea of exploring what images created in a place living with knowledge of it’s future obsolescence would be like. I believe that the work I made while there does carry with it some of the feeling of haunting, and it is true that should the islands go underwater some of my work will be actual documentation of what was there before. More importantly for me, visiting this place reinforced an idea I will keep exploring, that nothing can be truly distilled into a statistic. The people there know how to laugh, they continue to build new homes and businesses, they tweet constantly, and also, they are bound to the sea that surrounds them. It is that relationship that both sustains and imperils them, but it is a real relationship, not a set of numbers on a page.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2013/sep/26/maldives-test-case-climate-change-action