Transart Alumna Magda Biernat - Finalist in Greenpeace Photo Award 2018 Competition

Magda Biernat’s project UPROOTED has been selected as one of the seven projects competing for this year's Greenpeace Photo Award.

Early this year Greenpeace Switzerland, together with Geo Magazine, nominated 20 photographers from all over the world to write a project proposal that would explore the environmental issues we are facing today. From those 20 projects, seven were selected and we were asked to do a 3-minute video piece describing the project that would be shared with the public.

The projects compete for two awards: the jury award and the public award. You can enter your vote here: https://photo-award.org/?lang=en

Uprooted

We move. We retreat when the air is choked with dust and the soil repels any attempt to impregnate it with seed. We migrate. We relocate when the cracks in dry earth chase us from our ancestral homes, when the foundations melt beneath us or the very earth has been carved away to feed our endless resource quest. Like our cousins before us whom we no longer know, we go, we leave. We uproot and take stock of what we can carry and we call ourselves “displaced“.

Or, we stay. We plant ourselves in these shifting lands. What opportunities open in the face of disaster? Where a frontier of cold once held back all but the heartiest organisms, the line is now shifting. With heat comes thaw, and with thaw comes the collapse of an ecosystem to be replaced by another. 

UPROOTED is a new, long-term project that will utilize photography to focus on constructions of home and sense of place in communities around the world facing ecological dislocation. With support from Greenpeace, UPROOTED will take as its starting point the people and areas throughout the United States, beginning with Alaska, positioning trees, tree lines, and arboreal narratives as representations of perseverance and fragility. UPROOTED will tie together the built and natural environments on the fringes of changing ecological zones, and visually imagine the structures that connect populations and ecosystems.