Olafur Eliasson Earth perspectives: “Back to Earth” Serpentine Galleries, London

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The Earth viewed over the Great Barrier Reef, Australia The world’s biggest single structure made by living organisms, now dying due to human activity and mass coral bleaching.

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The Earth viewed over the Mariana Trench, Pacific Ocean The deepest trench on Earth, reaching almost 11,000 meters below sea level. Despite its extremity, both living organisms and human-made plastics have been found at its bottom.

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The Earth viewed over Yakutia, in Siberia, Russia Rising temperatures are thawing permafrost in this remote region, deforming landscapes, releasing large quantities of methane, and disrupting animal migration patterns.

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The Earth viewed over the Ganges River, India A sacred waterway granted the same legal rights as a human being by an Indian court in 2017.

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The Earth viewed over the Simien Mountains, Ethiopia One of the rare places in Africa where snow falls regularly, this range is part of the Ethiopian Highlands, known as the ‘Roof of Africa’.

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The Earth viewed over Chernobyl, in Pripyat, Ukraine The site of the worst nuclear disaster in history, where rare and endangered species now thrive in the absence of humans.

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The Earth viewed over the Greenland ice sheet A continent-wide ice sheet produced by falling snow over millions of years, now melting at staggering rates due to human-induced climate change.

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The Earth viewed over Ecuador The first country in the world to recognize Rights of Nature in their Constitution, ratified in 2008. Nature has the ‘right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles’.

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The Earth viewed over the South Pole The pole is at the heart of the virtually uninhabited continent of Antarctica, a vital ice-covered wildlife haven that is under threat from rapid warming and ice loss.

Earth perspectives, a new participatory artwork by Olafur Eliasson, has been launched on Earth Day on Wednesday 22 April 2020 as part of Back to Earth¹. Olafur Eliasson’s new work, Earth perspectives encapsulates how maps, space, and the earth itself are human constructs, which we have the power to see from other perspectives, whether individually or collectively. Eliasson has created a series of nine images of the Earth, each of which has been abstracted by turning the planet on a different axis. Each image also denotes a particular spot on Earth with a “dot”. If a viewer stares at the dot for about ten seconds and then trains their focus onto a blank surface, an afterimage appears in the complementary colours of Eliasson’s visual – the viewer literally projects a new world view.

Olafur Eliasson said: “Today, ‘the world as we know it’ is a phrase of the past. The current health crisis has brought our societies close to a halt, affecting our economies, our freedoms and even our social ties. We must take the time to empathise with all those struck by the crisis and also seize this opportunity to imagine together the earth that we want to inhabit in the future – in all its wonders and beauty, in the face of all the challenges ahead of us. Earth perspectives envisions the earth we want to live on together by welcoming multiple perspectives – not only human perspectives but also those of plants, animals, and nature. A glacier’s perspective deviates from that of a human. The same goes for a river. On Earth Day, I want to advocate – as on any other day – that we recognise these various perspectives and, together, celebrate their co-existence.”

Olafur Eliasson originally conceived one Earth perspective map for the magazine Real Review.