“Earthly Fabulations” exhibition: Photography in context

Get to know the artists behind the Der Greif “Earthly Fabulations” online exhibition for Earth Day

Der Greif opens today the online exhibition “Earthly Fabulations”, running from 22 April to 30 June, 2026. The "Earth Day 2026" open call we launched, invited lens-based artists to deconstruct the traditional and colonial history of landscape photography by engaging with the intersectional and systemic realities of our planet.

This online exhibition stems from ecocritical literature practices, examining the parallel histories of environmental exploitation while rooting artistic practice in a commitment to understanding and living in harmony with the specificities of local geographic regions and beyond. “Earthly Fabulations” moves on to speculative and critical fabulations. To fabulate is to bridge the gap between the archive and the imagination, surfacing voices and histories that have been historically erased by a human-centric, extractive (Western) gaze imposing itself on the other, particularly the non-human.

The twelve single images gathered in “Earthly Fabulations” act as a digital circuit of narratives pulsing with the necessity of ecological kinship. As seen in the toxic waters of the Romanian lake Geamăna, represented by Tomasz Kawecki, the environment is a ‘hyperobject’, to quote Timothy Morton: it’s a complex entity inextricably fused with our political, industrial, and social bodies. While the Geamăna lake reveals the landscape as oppressed by extractive mining, the Maumee River Watershed, one of the largest in the Great Lakes region in the U.S. and Canada, as narrated in “Bloom” by Kaya & Blank, collapses the distance between the industrial cause and biological effect. By growing "living photographs" from the very algae fueled by agricultural nitrates, the artist duo ensures that the subject of environmental degradation becomes the medium itself.

So the exhibition begins by confronting the extractive gaze through faboulative perspectives to move into “The Serlachius Project,” known as an artistic tracing and site-specific approach to the environment and history of the small town Mänttä in Finland. Sarah Spitzer intertwines fragments of archival materials from the collection of the Serlachius museum and current photographs of the local landscape and phytograms: all to merge in a play of retaining and losing, searching and finding and of oblivion and remembering. The landscape and nature themselves become direct carriers of memories together with their living beings.

With “Remedium” by Damian Wis the narrative shifts toward active intervention and the tangible possibilities of the here and now. This project centers on the dialogue between humans and nature within post-industrial sites in Katowice, Poland, specifically targeting slag heaps, anthropogenic scars that serve as enduring symbols of the Industrial Revolution’s intensive resource exploitation. To the artist, these heaps are simultaneously archives of past damage and laboratories for future survival. The project frames remediation as a profound narrative of responsibility and the limits of human control.

This transition from landscape as resource to remediation is echoed in “Forest Ruins” by Rafael Vilela, who examines a Guarani Indigenous territory embedded within a ‘megacity’. It reveals the persistent friction between colonial urban structures and Indigenous modes of care, continuity, and reciprocity. By treating elements like forest, smoke, and darkness as active agents rather than mere aesthetics, the project challenges anthropocentric vision. Through proximity and attention, it moves beyond simple denunciation to propose environmental critique as a fundamental rethinking of how we inhabit the world.

A central thread of the exhibition is the decentering of the human perspective in favor of more-than-human voices. Whether it is the one-thousand-hundred crustacean fragments forming hybrid beings in “Crustacea x Hominem x Photographia” by Eva Schmeckenbecher, or diptychs and images testing the photographic medium as a sensorial tool as in Elena Aya Bundurakis “Eating Magma” project, the artists invite us to inhabit ‘post-nature’ identities. We are asked to consider the hummingbird in “Glimmers, feathers and staring skies” not as a migratory, sentient, and mythically significant body: in Costa Rican folk belief, hummingbirds carry the souls of the dead and return to greet those they love, mention the artist. In these works, the non-human other is a participant in a dialogue of coexistence.

The digital circuit extends beyond the terrestrial, reaching into the atmosphere and the cosmos to challenge who has the right to see and control the planet. “Second Earth” by Ivar Veermäe and “The Earth is a Satellite of the Moon” by Luciana Demichelis interrogate the vertical dimension of our environment. By launching DIY weather balloons or building antennas to intercept Argentine satellite data, these artists reclaim the stratosphere from corporate and colonial monopolies. They suggest that sovereignty over our land begins with the sovereignty of our imagination.

Finally, the exhibition flows into water bodies addressing the blurred lines between reality and imagination in the disappearing landscapes of the North Sea with “How to Disappear” by Anastasia Miseyko and the drying beds of the Bolivian Lake Poopó through Sara Wayra’s “The life of water, presence and absence”.

The act of fabulation stands overall as a profound commitment to living in solidarity with the specificities of the world we are living in.

Explore all Artist Features from this special online exhibition to delve deeper into each artistic position.