chris jordan. retratos da cultura global de massa.

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http://www.chrisjordan.com/
portraits of global mass culture.

O artista Chris Jordan cria imagens impressionantes sobre estatísticas inimagináveis da cultura ocidental: “Como indivíduos fazemos estas coisas o tempo todo, todos os dias. Mas, quando milhões de pessoas têm esses comportamentos inconscientes, isso pode se acumular e ter consequências catastróficas, que ninguém gostaria ou pretendia que ocorressem”. Suas primeiras fotos, falavam do padrão de consumo/descarte dos Estados Unidos. Agora, sua escala é global. Brilhante. E assustador.

Chris Jordan: Plastic Bottles, 2007

Depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, 

the number used in the US every five minutes.

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This new series looks at mass phenomena that occur on a global scale. Similarly to the first Running the Numbers series, each image portrays a specific quantity of something: the number of tuna fished from the world's oceans every fifteen minutes, for example. But this time the statistics are global in scale, rather than specifically American.

Finding meaning in global mass phenomena can be difficult because the phenomena themselves are invisible, spread across the earth in millions of separate places. There is no Mount Everest of waste that we can make a pilgrimage to and behold the sobering aggregate of our discarded stuff, seeing and feeling it viscerally with our senses.

Instead, we are stuck with trying to comprehend the gravity of these phenomena through the anaesthetizing and emotionally barren language of statistics. Sociologists tell us that the human mind cannot meaningfully grasp numbers higher than a few thousand; yet every day we read of mass phenomena characterized by numbers in the millions, billions, even trillions.

Compounding this challenge is our sense of insignificance as individuals in a world of 6.7 billion people. And if we fully open ourselves to the horrors of our times, we also risk becoming overwhelmed, panicked, or emotionally paralyzed.

I believe it is worth connecting with these issues and allowing them to matter to us personally, despite the complex mixtures of anger, fear, grief, and rage that this process can entail. Perhaps these uncomfortable feelings can become part of what connects us, serving as fuel for courageous individual and collective action as citizens of a new kind of global community. This hope continues to motivate my work.

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