TROPIC ICE_DIALOG BETWEEN PLACES AFFECTED BY CLIMATE CHANGE 

BY BARBARA DOMBROWSKI

©TROPIC ICE

BY BARBARA DOMBROWSKI

TROPIC ICE_DIALOG BETWEEN PLACES AFFECTED BY CLIMATE CHANGE 

BY BARBARA DOMBROWSKI

Barbara Dombrowski is a renowned German photographer and artist. In early 2010, Barbara Dombrowski began visiting indigenous peoples on all 5 continents to bring them together in the photo-art project TROPIC ICE. The artist addresses the climate crisis in large installations. 

The TROPIC ICE project focuses on relevant and specific climate places and their people who live between established tradition and global modernity. Their existence and habitat are threatened, whether by direct or indirect effects of climate change.

In the first step, she visited the regions of East Greenland and the Amazon Basin in Ecuador, the Inuit and Achuar and Shuar peoples, which are among the tipping points in the climate system. Through multiple visits, the desire matured in her to confront both regions in an exhibition installation on site. In summer 2013, she returned to the regions with portraits and landscape photographs. By letting people and landscapes meet in the form of images of both climates, she created a fusion with the surrounding landscapes of the Arctic and the Amazon rainforest and she was able to create a bridge between the two cultures. 

For the installations, she chose lightweight textile banners measuring 112 cm x 165 cm. Nature was challenging as the banners had to hold up in high humidity in the rainforest or withstand strong cold winds in Greenland. The influence of destructive nature opened up yet another artistic level, symbolising the transience of all life.

After the first regions, the Amazon Basin and Greenland, which represent the continents of America and Europe, Dombrowski visited another three continents and visited their peoples. She chose the Maasai in Tanzania to represent Africa, the Mongolian nomads from the Gobi stand for Asia and the climatic zones of the deserts. The Micronesian people of the island atoll of Kiribati represent the fragile island worlds of the South Pacific and Oceania. 

In September 2019, the five continents were brought together in a new, large installation on the apron of the open-cast lignite mine at Hambach Forest, again by means of lightweight textile banners that are slowly destroyed by wind and rain. 

Through her years of work, the artist has gained a deep insight into the realities of their lives. Many peoples were or are animists. Often there is a strong connection to nature and a deep understanding of its laws. Animists believe that all life is animate and has an equal position in creation. Influenced by the Enlightenment and the Christian faith, the understanding of nature in our cultural sphere sees humans as the crown of creation, nature and other living beings as subject to us. The animists' relationship to the nature surrounding them and the symbolism derived from it inspired Dombrowski to present her 2nd installation cycle in the form of a circle, so that they always remain a part of the whole.

The climate crisis no longer affects only the global South, but is now omnipresent in the global North. Nothing that happens here remains without impact in the most remote places.

©TROPIC ICE

BY BARBARA DOMBROWSKI

Hambach Forest

©TROPIC ICE

BY BARBARA DOMBROWSKI

THE ARTIST

Barbara Dombrowski was born in Stuttgart. She studied visual communication at the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts until the early 1990s. Afterwards, initiated by an art scholarship from the Franco-German Youth Office, she spent four years in Paris. 

She works mainly on free projects that arise in cooperations and teaches documentary photography in Hamburg. She has acted as a juror and curator several times and gives lectures on her work Tropic Ice and the importance of artistic engagement with the climate crisis. In addition to cooperating with the Christian Albrecht University in Kiel on several projects, she was able to realise a book project entitled "Everyday Worlds of Climate Change" with the Cluster of Excellence at the University of Hamburg. 

Barbara Dombrowski is now a multi-award-winning artist and exhibits nationally and internationally. In 2017, she became an official partner of the UN at COP23 in Bonn with the work Tropic Ice. In 2020, during the European Weeks, a video performance of Tropic Ice complemented Beethoven's Pastorale in a world premiere with the Beethoven Symphony Orchestra.

www.tropic-ice.com

UPCOMING EXHIBITION

 Tropic Ice_Dialog between 

Places Affected by Climate Change 

30  July 2021 to 24. April 2022

in the

FORUM WÜRTH RORSCHACH 

Churerstrasse 10 

9400 Rorschach 

Swizzerland 

www.forum-wuerth.ch