**CAMERA TRAP: on looking I caught Mariana Silva’s Camera Trap on the last day it was exhibiting in the Gulbenkian Museum Lisbon Modern Collection Project Space on February 26th, 2018. Camera trap is, according to the artists’ statement: “a reflection on the mass extinction of the animal species and the practice of taking images in natural habitats….[where] ecological failure appears in the exhibition as fiction and document, narrative and reflection, past and future, past and post-humanity.”
Mariana Silva uses two circular screens (circular, like a camera lens) to introduce us to a speculative future in which people are no longer able to access the natural and animal world due to ecological devastation and extinction. In this world, people rely on digital image / virtual reality representations of nature, bugs, and animals - all but domestic animals - the two women featured in the video do have a house cat.
This story stops and starts again, is interrupted by images as they appear on the screen adjacent to it. Bees. Bugs. Birds, sometimes spanning across the entire visual field. They exist in image or digital representation if not exclusively, than heavily protected from the public. Speculative fiction can be understood as a medium that allows for a reflection on social crises, but following Munos, among other scholars in queer theory, disability, and diaspora studies, “Futurity can a problem” (2009, p.49) because futurity invokes ideal that seeks to very explicitly and implicitly eradicate signs of difference, particularly violent iterations of difference that are read as ‘suffering’ to those invested in white supremacist, heteronormative and embodied/neurotypical standards. We have to caution that the work of dystopia often re-inscribes structural violences “as white characters toil under the hardships that brown and black people experience acutely in real life” (Angelica Jade Bastien 2017).
I believe that Silva is doing more here, as she works in a critique of colonizing technologies throughout the piece. The story is told through conversations between these woman, who I will go ahead and assume are a lesbian couple given that they share a home and bed. One character is struggling with insomnia, anxiety and stress, which is resolved when her partner comes in to offer a virtual reality head set through which she can enjoy a virtual nature. Integral to this is a notation that she is a black woman, a figure who is markedly uncomfortable adjusting to the particularities of this unfolding “future”, perhaps because of the colonial and violent implications that have come with the fraught interaction with nature that come with a preservation-based approach to interacting with the natural world. In Rice et. al, they consider Garland-Thompson’s critique, where “the disjuncture of misfitting that exposes the privileges and fragilities of fitting also produces critical consciousness from which a crip politics and praxis of time might emerge”. What does this figure’s unease with this photograph-informed future leave with us with when we walk out of the room? These are technological interventions in nature and digital representation of a future in which human interaction with any world outside of domestic urban life is based only in images and representations:
The nature of the photograph as a regulating technology is central to this piece, in which we have archival text and videography juxtaposed with the futuristic digital images employed in the story. As a technology of capture (Sontag, 1977), “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed”, and Silva’s piece does a lot of work to unpack the ways in which technology, when used as a device of capture and containment - the only version of nature accessible to those existing in this world- creates particular forms of global, ecological, and human violences.