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Surreal Photographs Reveal Africa's Environment in Crisis

Fabrice Monteiro's 'The Prophecy' paints a bleak picture of Senegal's crumbling wilderness.
Images courtesy the artist

Climate change, drought, pollution, rising sea levels, habitat destruction—the world's environmental crises are obscufated by buzzwords, fake controversy, dystopian angst, and politics that make it difficult to actually hold the concepts in your mind, let alone discuss. Enter Belgian-Beninese photographer Fabrice Monteiro, whose new series The Prophecy uses elaborate costumes and sets to put faces and human bodies on the problems facing the world.

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Monteiro's work shines a spotlight of many facets of life in Africa, from antiquated slave irons, to the perceotion of albino Africans, to fashion photos. With The Prophecy, his goal is to make important ecological issues accessible for all audiences. "I wanted to create a tale for kids," Monteiro says in a documentary about the project. "For that I had to build a bridge between art and tradition." Working with designer Jah Gal, he traveled through Senegal to create 10 surreal characters that look like spirits from the apocalypse, which unfortunately isn't that far off from their actual inspirations.

"Here, it is our culture to believe in Djinns. And we believe in them," Gal says in the same short film. "Every forbidden thing is protected by a Djinn. But now with prograss and religions that came from abroad we forgot a little about those beliefs." Models are wrapped in garbage or debris littering the area, and framed by examples of various transgressions against the African wilderness—think runoff from a local slaughterhouse poisoning the ocean, big cars and coal fires polluting the atmosphere, and slash-and-burn agriculture sterilizing the land.

Gal and Monteiro worked with the environmentally-centered crowdfunding platform Ecofund to finance and distribute the series, which is now on display at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art through October 25. Check out The Prophecy and a making-of documentary below.

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See more of Fabrice Montiero's work on his website, and more of Jah Gal's work on Facebook.

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