Water

When I was a boy my mother took me to the Museum of Natural History in New York City. It was the closest thing to traveling we could do. There was a room with two floors and suspended from the ceiling in the dark, a 1:1 plexiglass model of a blue whale. The largest animal known ever to have existed. I’d lay on the floor and look up for quite some time. On the train home, I’d compare its size to things I saw around me and came up short. I couldn’t fathom how it ate or breathed. I wondered what it thought of things the size of me.

Visual language, and its capacity to impress upon a person an emotional and reflective condition, is the source of my relationship to the world. We make photographs, or a series of pictures and put them to sound, and from this we create empathy machines capable of shifting the way we see ourselves and others. When I imagine my work, and where it lives, I am reminded of this quote from John Updike from the Paris Review, issue no. 45, winter 1968.

“When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him.”

If our interaction with the planet is the fundamental question of our time, then what we do in response to climate change will determine our survival. Any work done on behalf of this to shift the paradigm of people could be the most useful and noble of modern efforts. I think of the blue whale more often now, after 13 years of making my work. I do not think of the politician in their hall of power who has forgotten the debt they owe the next generation. Or those who consume and buy and consume again to sate a bottomless appetite for objects.

Out there, somewhere now or later, is a kid who will look up at a blue whale, or a photograph, and they will not see a burning planet but a place, authentic and very unknown, and think not of themselves but what they might do for others. It is for this kid, a little east of Kansas, that I make my work.

Mustafah Abdulaziz is part of »Guest Room: Boaz Levin & Sophia Greiff«.