LIFE BEFORE, PUBLICATION
Detail of I HAVE ARISEN, Var.2 |2021
Var. 2/3 + 2AP, Series: The Myths of Eternal Life, Chapter I, Var.2, 156,5x231cm, Screenprint on linen and vintage linen sack, hand threaded stitches
LIFE BEFORE
Book Publication
ORGANIZED BY Paradigm Publishing
Sponsored by adidas
Release November 20, 2021
“In 2014, PARADIGM released its first major body of work in the form of a 376 hardcover book with contributions on the topic of Genesis by over 60 artists. This is when Christopher and myself began to manifest our burden of dreams. This book will be a distillation of that same idea except around the topic of LIFE BEFORE_ with an all-star crew of artists and intellectuals who will contribute original work on the topic and statement above. The book is the backbone of the LIFE BEFORE_ collection which is made entirely out of recycled ocean plastic and landfill, raising awareness around the immediate need to change how we perceive clothing consumption.
The idea for LIFE BEFORE_ came to me after reading David Wallace-Wells The Uninhabitable Earth (Life After Warming). Like many readers, the book evoked simultaneous terror and hope within me about our future, along with feelings of regret and new will. Sea-level rise, food scarcity, economic collapse and climate conflict are among many of the inevitable side effects humans will encounter. We must ask ourselves the hard questions like: At what point will the climate crisis grow undeniable? How much irreversible damage will have already been done? At the crossroads of ecological collapse and social despair lies the need to tell new stories and build new worlds. While people can and have been telling the stories of a new era emerging where the ecologies we set in motion are threatening a new global extinction event, we have invented corporate persons that have to change pathologies in order to avoid such an event. Artists should create works that address the urgent dangers that society faces. I call on YOU, the art world and corporations to use their agency to get people to wake up to the threat of the destruction of the planet. A deep destruction is taking place, in and of nature, on an unprecedented scale.”
Theophilos Constantinou