Marcel Rickli

A photographer based in Zurich. He studied Photodesign study at College of Design in Bern. His works were exhibited in Zurich, Basel, Biel, among others. Since 2011, Marcel Rickli has been exploring the ways in which we are fundamentally changing our planet in an ongoing series of photographic field studies. The energy and resource requirements of humanity and their resulting environmental impacts, which are often severe and irreversible, form the leitmotif of his work. In previous works, Marcel Rickli trained his camera on ore mining in Sweden, which results in massive land subsidence and has even caused the resettlement of an entire city (“Kiruna / 2015”), as well as on brown coal mining in Germany, to which entire landscapes are sacrificied (“Lausitzer Braunkohlerevier / 2015”). New hopes in the fight against climate collapse have also caught his attention: pictures of the world’s largest wind farm in the Gobi Desert and a Chinese solar power plant that couldn’t be more futuristic illustrate what the energy revolution could look like (“Ambivalent / 2017 – 18”). Rickli’s work impressively captures an epoch in which humankind has become the most important influencing factor on our planet’s biological, geological and atmospheric processes: the Anthropocene.
AEON
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AEON

Swiss photographer and artist Marcel Rickli reflects on pressing concerns about radioactive waste in the form of a visual research project in the field of tension between documentary photography and art. His latest work, AEON, contrasts the symbolic nature of nuclear semiotics with the factuality of repositories as they are planned and built today.
Marcel Rickli