Wildlife/Animals nominee

By documenting the uncanny presence of wild animals in an industrial complex in South Africa we observe one of many curious examples where man's relationship with nature's oldest continent has changed as a result of industrialization processes.

The absence of human figures in these photos may, however, suggests a dystopian mirrored scenario: one in which the animals are not being studied by a team of researchers as endangered, here they claim possession of our industrial archeologies, feeding themselves on the detritus of our failures as a society who have caused the depletion of the original ”territorial glory."

A landscape that describes a détournement process shows us the contradictions of the capitalist model in the Cape Town Provinces. Abundant industrial architecture sits in front of an extravagant wild sight consisting in containers, old ships from pirates used by neighboring film studios, a bleached landscape, zebras, eland and springboks that inhabit the garden particle accelerator.

Without a human in sight, it brings to mind ideas of the pressure we put on the land with our relentless momentum of industrialization, and of the legacy we leave on the natural world we share with so much other life.

BIO
Martina Alice Tolotti is a Berlin based architect and photographer born in Milan. She has studied at Politecnico di Milano in Italy, at Bauhaus Universität in Germany and at University of Cape Town in South Africa. During her studies she has started to photograph due to a need of an expansion and analytical tool to distill reality.
While working in an architectural studio, I make independent photographic research, and my camera becomes a story telling device that creates fictional landscape, inviting the person to travel through time and evolution.

EXIBITIONS
In 2021 I've been displaying my work for the Series "Chrónosurficie" at the KUNSTQUARTIER BETHANIEN in Berlin

AWARDS
During 2020 I’ve won the Life Framer competition in London awarded and judged by Tate Modern Curator Emma Lewis, and become a member of their collection. Between 2020 and 2021 I’ve been a seminarist at the OKS in Berlin guided by Tobias Kruse.

PUBLICATIONS
In 2016 and 2017 I've collaborate with the magazine Kodd in Paris with a Reportage about the Burning Man Issue, at the book "DAILY PORTRAIT" for Martin Gabriel Pavel, published my photos on the book "Achtsamkeit und die Kunst des bewussten Essens" by Beate Caglar.