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Richard Mosse – Broken Spectre

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Mosse pushes the boundaries of photography to raise an urgent warning cry over catastrophic destruction in the Amazon rainforest.

Devastation in the Amazon rainforest and the climate change it triggers tend to unfold in ways that are too vast to comprehend, too minute to perceive, and too normalised to see. In an attempt to render the scale and urgency of the Amazon’s extensive, impending collapse, Richard Mosse’s most ambitious work to date employs a dazzling array of photographic techniques.

Broken Spectre is an immersive, 74-minute film that shifts between a manifold of ecological narratives, from the topographic to the anthropocentric, and to a careful examination of nonhuman violence and survival. Mosse and his team spent years documenting different fronts of destruction, degradation and environmental crimes in the Amazon Basin and related eco-systems.

Broken Spectre operates on multiple scales: inky, fluorescent microscopic imagery describes the interdependent complexity of the Amazonian biome in scientific detail, while cinematic monochrome infrared scenes track illegal mining, logging and burning, industrial agriculture and indigenous activism. 

Meanwhile, airborne multispectral footage starkly renders vast swathes of empty land in contrast to the lush rainforest, showing the vast scale and systematic organisation of the Amazon’s destruction.

In accompanying photographic works, Mosse renders the invisible visible: through multispectral cameras that emulate satellite imaging technology, alongside ultraviolet botanical studies, and heat-sensitive analogue film warped, mottled and degraded by the oppressive environment and by the burning forest itself. Accompanying these experimental documentary works are Mosse's hypnotically vivid aerial maps, which zoom out and colourise the scale and extent of natural decimation in piercing detail, employing specially-made Geographic Information System (GIS) imaging technology.

As climate change continues to define our era and the future of the planet, Mosse bears witness to a rapidly unfolding catastrophe: recent scientific studies predict that the Amazon is close to reaching a tipping point, at which stage it will no longer be able to generate rain, triggering mass forest dieback and carbon release at devastating levels, impacting climate change, biodiversity, and local and international communities. Mosse shows both human sides of the tragedy: from the Yanomami and Munduruku Indigenous communities fighting for survival; to illegal gold miners poisoning and destroying entire river systems for tiny handfuls of gold; alongside Brazilian cowboys wilfully burning their pristine surroundings to create pasture for cattle to sell on international meat and leather markets.

Created from 2018 to 2022, Broken Spectre was published ahead of the significant general elections in Brazil in which Jair Bolsanaro was stripped of the presidency. Bolsonaro and his executive decimated Brazil's environmental protection agencies and opened the floodgates of deforestation, exponentially accelerating the Amazon's destruction. Should Bolsanaro have been victorious in his 2022 campaign, the fate of the Amazon may have been sealed forever.



Broken Spectre is currently exhibited at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, 12 January – 16 March 2024; Musée de l'Elysée, Switzerland, 2 November 2023 – 28 January 2024; BOZAR, Brussels, 01 Dec 23 – 21 Jan 24; The Momentary, Bentonville, AK, 18 Nov 23 – 14 Apr 24.

Broken Spectre was previously exhibited at 180 Studios, London, 12 October – 26 February 2023; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, 30 September 2022 – October 2023; the Converge 45 Biennial, opening 24 August 2023 in Portland, Oregon; and Minnesota Street Project Foundation, 1201 Minnesota Street, 11 May - 30 June 2023.

  • Richard Mosse (b. 1980) is an Irish artist currently based in New York. Documenting some of the most significant humanitarian and environmental crises of our time, his work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Barbican Art Gallery in London, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Recent survey exhibitions were held at Kunsthalle Bremen (2022) and MAST Foundation, Bologna (2021). Mosse was the recipient of the Prix Pictet 2017, the winner of the 2014 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, and represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale with the six-screen video installation The Enclave in 2013.

    Previous publications by Mosse include The Castle (MACK, 2018), Incoming (MACK, 2017), and Infra (Aperture Foundation, 2012).
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