C/O Berlin is pleased to announce the first recipients of the After Nature . Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize 2024: Laura Huertas Millán (b. 1983, Colombia) and Sarker Protick (b. 1986, Bangladesh). A double exhibition will be first presented at C/O Berlin in the Amerika Haus from Sep 14, 2024, to Jan 22, 2025. Afterwards, it will move to the Open Space of the Crespo Foundation in Frankfurt am Main starting from February 2025.
Laura Huertas Millán
In her prizewinning film projection, Laura Huertas Millán investigates the cultural, medicinal, and ritual uses of coca long before cocaine was first produced in Europe in the nineteenth century. Starting with the plant’s prohibition during the Spanish colonization of Latin America, Millán develops a speculative narrative that focuses on a group of métisse women who secretly distributed coca leaves in the seventeenth century. In reaction to the lack of archival material, the artist uses fiction as a strategy, visualizing in a fragmentary narrative the colonial appropriation of nature and the role of resistance in this process.
Sarker Protick
Sarker Protick examines the extensive changes imposed by humans on the Indian subcontinent in his prizewinning project. Focusing on the historical region of Bengal, which today includes India and Bangladesh, he transfers the examination of the colonial history of the British Empire to a photographic study of the present. He is interested in the expansion of the railroad and the development of coal mining in the nineteenth century. Traveling through Bangladesh and India, he created a body of photographs that addresses the global, geopolitical, and historical dimensions of imperialism as the source of the Anthropocene and its impact on the climate crisis in a visual language that is precise and atmospheric.
