© Simon Carruthers from the series 'Cycles'. Every item that we own has an origin. All that surrounds us in our homes and places of work, or as we journey through a modern metropolis has been extracted from the natural world. The man-made world is a world that has been wholly created from the raw materials found on and just beneath the earth’s surface. As it is true that all these items have an origin, it is also true that the components of the synthetic world have a destiny – a final resting place – for when we no longer require them. Their presence in our company is often fleeting. Once it has been decided that they are no longer wanted or needed, manufactured goods are returned to the earth, as waste. Cycles is an ongoing UK-based project that looks at the methods and the results of an accelerated climate of consumerism. The images tend to fall into one of two categories; the infrastructure supporting the consumption of domestic goods, and the net results of our consumption. The series was inspired by a sustainability report carried out by NEF, concluding that in the UK we use over three times our share of global resources.

What impact does environmental change have on society and individuals? At this precise moment in history, awareness of the ability of human action to affect the planet on a global/local scale is at the highest levels in the scientific community and is rampant in public opinion. The term Anthropocene, introduced by the chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen to define the current geological era, has made its way into the common dictionary. Yet the challenges to be solved are overwhelmingly urgent. A conflictual gap is growing with the new generations who observe an "adult" class unable to take the issue seriously. The consequences of this "shared impasse" are evident. They manifest all their intensity in the frequent calamitous events widespread in the media (fires, floods, storms, etc...), in the state of perennial pollution of cities and urbanized countryside, in the disappearance of biodiversity also cultural, in migratory pressures, in the fragility in general of the human species increasingly allergic to its surroundings.

Installation view of the exhibition 'ENVIRONMENTAL' at Lab27, Treviso, 2022

© Giuseppe De Santis & Giuseppe Dipace from the series 'Pazienza Rubata' ('Stolen Patience'). "The non-profit community urban garden immediately seemed to us to be the right place to talk about care: to restore the suffocating knowledge of our world to its original salvific function. We have chosen to act with the photographic medium in this scenario for five months, focusing on a vegetable garden that could channel with its semi-circular and valley conformation close to a peripheral "modern Colosseum" expressive virtues into the images with greater force. Garden is inhabited by people of various ages, coming from other cities, surrounding areas, or perhaps even from the opposite building. Some people would have liked that space to have a very different function. A parking lot, for example. Agricultural activity in a peripheral city context thus exploits the current contrasting conditions inherent in these two realities. This is the main aspect we wanted to tell about this activity: the therapeutic force that working the land can release, beyond the pragmatic aspects of production. We believe that a healthy output is a direct consequence of a genuine acceptance of such original principles."

© Mia Carolina Rogersdotter from the series 'Ädno / Älven / The River'. A journey along the Lule River in the north of Sweden. The work was originally presented as a photobook with a bright pink hardcover, inspired by the flower Rosebay Willowherd. The river ends up in the author's hometown and this work is a way to rediscover her water and to understand the impact the hydropower stations had created. She followed the river from the mountains to sea - the brutal landscape of industries, dry furrows, electricity lines, old forests and still water. It takes us 450 km straight through the county Norrbotten. This damaged land raises questions, since the hydro power is considered as "green electricity" in Sweden, on where we are going in our quest for energy sources today.

Installation view of the exhibition 'ENVIRONMENTAL' at Lab27, Treviso, 2022

© Diego Brambilla from the series 'Off the Mark'. As a healing tool to overcome personal distress, Diego Brambilla used to immersing himself in exploring woods and mountains. But instead of focusing on discovering new places, he wandered over and over the same ones. They appear more and more familiar yet, once photographed, they start to look odd and mysterious. According to the Oxford dictionary, 'Off the Mark' means, A long way from an intended target. Even if natural subjects are portrayed, their shapes and geometries playfully suggest an inward journey, which becomes, at times, unusual and ironic.

A group of authors selected through the Urbanautica call 'What's the Urgency?' were exhibited from December 2021 to February 2022 at the Lab27, in Treviso, Italy. The exhibition 'ENVIRONMENTAL' offers a selection of works that invite you to address the complexity of the stakes, glimpse possible perspectives, isolate topics for further study, and encourage dialogue and debate as far as possible. The works on display are so many windows on the world that slow down the gaze, produce a disenchantment, create more space to think. Therefore, the title relies on the adjective "environmental" to decontextualize the ordinary meaning and tackle other implications. 

Silvia Mangosio, from the series 'Damage Control' An invitation to reflect on the heavy repercussions of an uncertain present and a disturbing future. Silvia Mangosio points them out to us starting from the body, sometimes depicted in self-portraits, or molded into sculptures that reveal unequivocal concave and hollow things to us.

Installation view of the exhibition 'ENVIRONMENTAL' at Lab27, Treviso, 2022

'Excl' by Julius C Schreiner. The work combines three chapters dealing with the displacement and general struggles of marginalized groups such as homeless people, refugees, drug addicts, teenagers, or just "bad" consumers. The chapter 'Silent Agents', shows various forms of exclusionary interventions in urban (supposedly) public space, the so-called "defensive architecture" or "hostile design". Staged with several lighting technics, these images have been produced with a mobile studio, set up at night to highlight these installations who are supposed to be not noticed by the regular user. But been modified or build for the purpose to displace or discipline them. "Large heavy stones lying under a bridge, seemingly at random. They are hardly noticeable, not to the walker passing by, not to the cyclist passing by. Yet the stones were put there on purpose, too big and too heavy to be rolled away by those who seek shelter here from the rain, wind, and cold". Contrary to Bentham's prison concept via the panopticon, in which inmates discipline themselves through the mediated, uninterrupted surveillance. The installations thematized here do become "silent agents." Designed to control the behavior of the people without the actual presence of the respective authorities. Whereby the commonality of the two concepts lies in the disciplining through the design of the space. Through the subliminal disciplining the behavior is influenced more subtly, this does affect the individual actors depending on social, cultural, and economic capital.

Still image from the video "New Images from the Earth” by Tolga Akbaş. Human history shows that wherever the human trail goes, there is destruction. Wherever we leave a mark, we cause some disruptions in natural processes.

The call launched by Urbanautica had the specific purpose of selecting projects that lead to thinking about social urgencies in the contemporary world as much to a rethinking of what does urgency means. We live in the age of haste, of the accelerated change in which nothing seems to reach maturity and, as Goethe wrote, one lives day to day while achieving nothing. An age described by individuals in the perennial and restless pursuit of the future, and in which the true great absentee, paradoxically, is time. Forced to think at an increasing speed, to pursue truths that lie in tomorrow rather than in today, to become events ourselves, to act according to pressing and not very biological rhythms, how can we then face global challenges that require a reflective and not speculative attitude? We have received considerable stimuli from all over the world which have transmitted to us the complexity, the versatility of the numerous open questions. There are many unresolved questions, which concern the intimate sphere of the individual up to the dimensions of collective living, and the survival of the planet. We have published a selection of these proposals in our archive. Once again a plurality of languages ​​and approaches testifies to the fertility of the medium, and comforts us on the potential yet to be expressed.

© Noah Addis. Spaces that become alienating, forgotten playgrounds, geographies poised between nostalgia and resignation as in the shattered American dream. (Check a previous interview from the archive of Urbanautica.)

Installation view of the exhibition 'The Flood', by Francesco Merlini, at Lab27, Treviso, 2022

We continue to research and question ourselves about the way we look at the world. What opportunities for our consciousness, and the narration of world priorities, can be traced in the medium of photography as an instrument of reproduction, investigation, survey, interpretation, and itself an object of reflection? Do the emergencies concern the rights or duties of the individual within a society? In a world of shattered communities and stateless individuals in frenetic competition, in a space that erases identity and specificity through instantaneous, oedipal virtuality, which devours or trivializes the past, can a photographer still embody a militant gaze? Or must the author succumb to a Promethean gap leading to be swallowed up by one's reflected image? Is there also room for a "paideia", for building a communitarian social conscience or should we be sated with abstractions, skepticisms, doubting reality, infinite nostalgia, philosophical delusions?

© With the project 'R', Miguel Novais Rodrigues has been thinking about how this act of flattening, of compressing experience into a plane visual language affects our understanding of embodied experience. 'R' is a sort of reaction to Alberti’s idea of the "aperta finestra". It is, at the same time, a journey through the surface-ness of photographic seeing, and an attempt to trace the performativity of living within this limitation through scratching and sketching. Like an inmate scratching the days on the wall as a reminder of the passing of time. The sense of urgency here is to find a way to decompress this constellation of flattened gestures. To sense images as spots on a score, and bring them back to the duration of our being.

Alongside this exhibition, the Lab27 space also hosted the exhibition 'The Flood' by Francesco Merlini. On the threshold of reality and symbolism, the Italian documentary photographer recounts the reminiscence of the disaster that struck Tbilisi, in 2015. People died, many families were left homeless, a zoo destroyed and a city in shock. The capital of Georgia became a desert filled with dangerous beasts. The zoo has lost more than 300 animals. An influential head of the Georgian Orthodox Church attributed the floods to the "sin" of the former Communist regime who built the zoo using the money raised from the destruction of churches and the melting of their bells. A kind of divine punishment. The reality is less grotesque, and the floods break through the defenses erected by men in every part of the world. Nature advances beyond the illusions of being able to contain it. Merlini's photographs move on this threshold of uncertainty, on a precarious balance, in which the clamor of the debacle seems clouded by a gray patina of oblivion. The same work had already been published in our publication 'Extinction. The World Without Us?', in 2020.

Installation view of the exhibition 'The Flood', by Francesco Merlini, at Lab27, Treviso, 2022

© Francesco Merlini from the series 'The Flood'

© Francesco Merlini from the series 'The Flood'

We are pleased that our research continues to foster dialogue and dissemination around issues of relevance and urgency such as environmental ones. We believe that photography can but above all should work as a means to raise awareness of the importance of these issues. And we will continue to do so.