The Island, the Mine, and the Resistance Gardens: Public Programme
The public program accompanying The Island, the Mine, and the Resistance Gardens, by Crystal Bennes with Mohamed Sleiman Labat, extends the exhibition’s inquiry into fertiliser as a site where histories of food production, white supremacy, and empire intersect with the environmental and social consequences of extractive capitalism.
How can artistic practices make visible the relationships between ecological, social, and political systems? What alternative ways of looking, writing, and storytelling might allow us to reconsider dominant narratives? Through film screenings, conversations, and workshops, the program brings together diverse forms of research and artistic practice that explore how images, materials, and stories shape our understanding of land, resources, and lived experience.
Two strands run through this and future programs at Fotogalleriet. Scaffolding is a series of critical writing workshops, hosted by artists and writers, offering tools for thinking through the conceptual, ethical, and political questions raised by image-making and cultural practice. Mediated Visits creates shared encounters with the exhibition, through collective discussion and mapping, offering specific entry points for different publics.
Film screening and conversation
DESERT PHOSfate is an experimental documentary by Sahrawi artist Mohamed Sleiman Labat. It weaves through the story of phosphate, exploring connections between land, sand particles, plants, human, and mineral displacement. Through poetics rooted in the desert, it highlights connections between ecological justice, colonial practices, environmental violence, traces of anthropocentric mineral extraction, and the loss of indigenous ways of knowing and telling about the world.
Told from the perspective of a Sahrawi artist, the film doesn’t attempt to follow conventional Western cinematic methods or structures. Instead, it draws on narratives and philosophies rooted in the Sahrawi way of living. It foregrounds indigenous ways of telling stories through metaphors, dream telling, and fables. Such poetic and nonlinear methods from the Sahrawi perspective can offer another way of narrating the Sahrawi experience.
DESERT PHOSfate is a poetic rhyming combination of phosphate and fate, referring to the fate, destiny and the current and future impact of phosphate on the Sahrawi community, global economies, and ecosystems.
The screening will be followed by a conversation between Mohamed Sleiman Labat and Crystal Bennes.
Critical Writing Workshop
Your JPEG Is Showing is a three-session writing workshop led by artist Jelsen Lee Innocent, exploring what images reveal beyond what they intend. Open to all, no writing or photography background required, the workshop examines how visual culture extracts consent, attention, and complicity from viewers, often without their awareness.
Participants will collectively engage with images, still and moving, to confront their interpretations of society and their place within it. Together they will explore, scan, speak, look, and write to practice what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls counter-visuality (The Right to Look, 2011): a refusal of the dominant visual order. Drawing on writers including bell hooks, W.J.T. Mitchell, and Christina Sharpe, the workshop treats writing not as a craft to perform but as a tool to re-orient what an image does, what it hides, and what it asks of us.
Visit the separate page for more information about the workshop here.
The public programme is part of Fotogalleriet’s ongoing commitment to think about and with images, and was curated by Belén Santillán. All events are free and open to all.