Paradox

Shishmaref is a community of about 600 people, located on an island just off the west coast of Alaska. The effects of global warming threaten the very existence of these people- so much that the entire population needs to be relocated off the island within 10 years. They have become the first tangible victims of the worldwide climate changes. The project exists of several components; exhibition, book, film, website, and educational program. In the documentary Jan Louter depicts the impending end of the traditional lifestyle on the island of Shishmaref trough the lives of three Inupiat families. Despite the alarming situation, the film has not become a political manifesto. The Last Days of Shishmaref is a moving film about identity, transience, mortality, and the clash between different eras and cultures.

In The Wars photographer Oscar van Alphen combines an adapted version of Georges Bataille's text 'Madame Edwarda' with images drawn from his archive. 'Madame Edwarda' is a story with no beginning nor an end. A male first-person narrator and a prostitute encounter in Paris by night. It's a story about lust, power, anxiety, desire, and humiliation. Van Alphen uses Bataille's text as a metaphor for the perversity of social structures, for the uncontrollability of political and economic power, and the effects of these on human dignity. He juxtaposes pictures from the decaying and almost deserted industrial regions in Northern France and of the 1968 student rebellion in Paris, with the pornographic text from the first years of World War II.