Uneven encounters

2014—2021

"The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them so that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again."

– Cormack McCarthy, "The Crossing" (1994)

Places are animals: we encounter them unexpectedly and on terms that are not entirely clear to us. Foreign and inarticulate, they present us with semiotics unlike our own, our efforts to understand them now scattered across a variety of sciences, arts and fields. We don't even know, which part of it is important.

Uneven Encounters was shot in various ecoregions of the American Southwest, including parts of the Arizona/New Mexico plateau, Southwestern tablelands, the Colorado Front Range, parts of the Great plains, and others. It seeks to cover the broad range of the land's structural, social and geologic variety in an attempt to engage with it.