Imagine the future

Libbert made two important journeys in 2021.

On La Palma, the Cumbre Vieja volcano erupted. For three months, the volcano spewed out toxic fumes, black ash, and all-destroying lava. Everything man had built was swept away in a sludge of hot lava or buried under ash. Libbert photographed the black landscape that remained, the cloud formations that emerged, and the nature that was covered.

Parallel to this, Libbert's work took her to an aircraft graveyard in Spain. Here, planes are parked, dismantled, and recycled, and Libbert was given the opportunity to photograph the process behind the scenes. With a view on the one hand of mechanical vehicles that were once capable of getting people into the air and flying around the world, and on the other, organic forms of colorful plants in a black ash landscape, they appear to be two opposing series. But perhaps they are more like two chapters from one book. Decommissioned aircraft—for many, once their introduction to large-scale travel and luxury—are being prematurely grounded due to COVID and are reaching the end of their life cycle to be recycled, thereby making room for more climate-friendly planes. But the volcano, too, is a catapult that destroys everything, including many dreams, yet ultimately—in the Earth's life cycle—is also the foundation for new fertile soil.

What naturally connects these two worlds above all is the gaze with which Libbert photographs them and the paradox in which she finds herself. Whether it is an accumulation of sawn-off airplane wings or an ash-covered flower, Libbert imbues them with a unique animalistic power through tone, compassion, and attention to detail. Libbert moves within the subject of the Anthropocene but does so not judgmentally, but with a certain subtlety. And that is not without reason. The fact that she does not shout it from the rooftops but reveals it subtly in seemingly beautiful landscapes and compositions aligns with her reflection on her own actions and her view of the moral paradox of contemporary life and this era. To create her work, Libbert regularly boards a plane, and that plane is also regularly the subject of the photography she provides on a commercial basis for KLM. Libbert immediately experiences the paradox of, on the one hand, a climate-conscious attitude and, on the other, the reality of the average producer and consumer. Her work is not a moral condemnation of the other, but a reflection on herself and, above all, on the limitations of our control.