Richard Mosse uses military-grade surveillance equipment intended for detecting enemy movement for an unintended use: to document the plight of refugees, an extension of an earlier project titled Incoming.
Via Monovisions:
Mosse’s latest body of work was made with an advanced new military-grade surveillance camera. Under test conditions, the camera has proved able to detect a human body from 30.3 kilometers. The camera is produced by a multinational defense and security corporation that manufacturers cruise missiles, drones, and other technologies. Primarily designed for surveillance, it can also be connected to weapons systems to track and target the enemy. The camera dehumanizes its subject, portraying refugees – whose statelessness has stripped them of essential human rights – as a mere biological trace, evoking Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’. Mosse’s ambitious new project meditates on the struggle and condition of refugees through ideas of hypothermia, warmth, epidemic, climate change, weapons targeting, border surveillance and mortality.
By attaching the camera to a robotic motion-control tripod, Mosse has scanned significant sites in the European refugee crisis from a high eye-level, creating densely detailed panoramic thermal images. Each artwork has been painstakingly constructed from a grid of almost a thousand smaller frames, each with its own vanishing point. Seamlessly blended into a single expansive thermal panorama, these images evoke certain kinds of classical painting, such as those by Pieter Bruegel or Hieronymus Bosch, in the way that they describe space and detail. They are documents disclosing the fences, security gates, loudspeakers, food queues, tents, and temporary shelters of camp architecture, as well as isolated disembodied traces of human and animal motion and other artifacts that disrupt each precarious composition and reveal its construction. Very large in scale, Heat Maps reveal intimate details of fragile human life in squalid, nearly unlivable conditions on the margins and in the gutters of first world economies.
• Richard Mosse: Heat Maps (Monovision)
