"the modern growth of worldlessness, the withering away of everything between us, can be described as the spread of the desert"
Hannah ARENDT

Disappearing
Worlds

The idea of the world is key to how we understand human habitation and belonging. But unlike the earth or the planet, to write of "the world" is a more fraught and contested affair. Worlds are imagined, they are constructed, they are brought into being and they can also be wilfully destroyed. The very idea of the world itself gained widespread understanding with the discovery of the 'New World", which unequivocally showed how it's very naming was inseparable from concerns with power, conquest and violence. Ever since, Worlds have collided, been at war and their destruction celebrated.

But what does it mean to speak of the world today? Has or world, this world we occupy, become unliveable? What image of the world are we imagining? And which worlds are disappearing before our very eyes? None of this is divorced from history. The past is haunted by worlds now lost and unrecoverable. They have vanished through the tremendous weight of absence the violence of forgetting has placed on our worldly shoulders. Nor can we speak about the disappearance of worlds without dealing with the lived conditions of wordlessness many on are currently enduring, along with issues of ecology and those technologies that can bring about our very annihilation. The project deals with these concerns to ask what futures are also disappearing on the horizon.

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Eden Bleeds

CHANTAL MEZA
J HENRY FAIR

st mary's Church, Bristol
March/April, 2025

Eden is bleeding her colours into a toxifying world. Oceans are corroding, mountains as scorched as the darkest abyss. Forests have become raging infernos, while the vision of paradise left carried on the winds by messengers who are barely able to breathe. If there was an original sin, it plagues weren’t solely to be borne by humans alone. Eden is bleeding and the humanity she homes is also part of the fall. Yet there is beauty in the horror, vibrant majesty in the recoloration of a planet that still somehow manages to give despite all that has been taken from her. And so we must once again learn to be witnesses to the original flows of life – the abstract power of colour and imagination, which is as true to nature as it is true to the original gestures in art.

Eden Bleeds features the collaborative visions and testimonies of the renowned New York photographer J Henry Fair and the Mexican painter Chantal Meza. Asking what is this vision for the planet we have now given to ourselves; it attends with urgency the scorching of the earth and its devastated ecologies whose visceral energies have thrown us into flux. What appears in the colour are disappearing life-world systems. What appears in the ferocious lines are the misguided energies of extraction and depletion. What shadows the contrasts is a planet so oversaturated it’s only a matter of time before all the colours bleed into a perilous hole, which now resides where Eden once stood.