Untitled, Rondônia

Richard Mosse’s video sculpture “Untitled, Rondônia”, while depicting environmental crimes and the erosion of human rights, does not strive for photorealism. Photographs from Mosse’s series “Tristes Tropique”, shot in Rondônia, were taken by fitting a camera to a drone. Flying it over sites of environmental crimes, it captured bandwidths of reflected light, many of which are invisible to the human eye. Mosse created dramatic topographies that are disorienting for anyone who doesn’t know how to read them but that reveal the scale of the brutal degradation of the Amazonian rainforest. And the many ways through which such catastrophe can be achieved: plantations of palm trees, intensive soy bean farming, cattle farms, illegal mining and other forms of environmental criminality. For his video sculpture “Untitled, Rondônia”, Mosse lifts this loss of orientation to a new level, literally immersing the viewer in a landscape of images being reflected in two connected mirrors.