Performance on the edge of what was once the shoreline of the Aral Sea at Moynack, Uzbekistan, 2012.
“They grew cotton here for years. For centuries there was a good price for it because it was never over cultivated – the constraint always was (and still is) the tropics’ chronic shortage of water. To cultivate a new field of cotton one would have to take water from the gardens, cut down forests, kill off the cattle. But then how would one live, from what, and what would one eat? Everyone in India, in China, in America, in Africa, has known this dilemma for thousands of years. And in Moscow? In Moscow they also know it! The catastrophe began in the sixties. Two more decades were then needed to turn half of the fertile oases of Uzbekistan into desert.”
– Ryszard Kapuscinski, Imperium. 1993.
Above: Sunrise, over the Aral Sea, Uzbekistan, 2012.
Below: Images from a body of performance work What Could a Man From the West… Performed at Tbilisi Triennial, Georgia, 2012.
