ARCHIVO WEBINAR SERIES 2026

SITUATED PRACTICES FOR UNSETTLED FUTURES

From Public Smog to A People's Archive of Sinking and Melting

AMY BALKIN

In Amy Balkin’s projects, the photographic image operates in the service of negotiating and reframing human and other-than-human experiences toward a survivable future.

In Public Smog, the photographic image is enlisted to prefigure and document the process of opening a ‘clean air’ park in the atmosphere. Efforts to open Public Smog have included trading and withholding credits in emission and carbon markets, and an ongoing effort to inscribe Earth’s atmosphere on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The photographic image appears across the process of this long-term project: in collaboration with photographers to create public billboards of local landscapes anticipating the park’s future opening over Cameroon, the Canary Islands, and Australia, and in collage and multimedia documentation.

In A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting (Balkin, et al.), Technosol Library, and Smog Index, participants record, reconceive, and represent the uneven and individualized impacts of climate change and environmental pollution. In these projects participants engage from their own positions of risk, impact, or loss, whether contributing an object and documentation to an archive of ‘what will have been,’ collecting technogenic soils through site research, monument marking, and photography, or contributing photographs taken during smog events to form a global record.

In the ‘visual essay’ projects Area of Interest, The Atmosphere, A Guide and CCZ/Malta, photographic images and archival materials are repurposed to remap inaccessible or uninhabitable ecological zones. As a widely distributed free poster, a public billboard in Philadelphia, and a photo essay, these three projects address the control and exploitation of Earth’s atmosphere, the seabed, and urban soils, and their respective human and other-than-human entanglements. In these projects, images produced and retained for military, extractive, or academic research use (promotional videos for undersea mining, herbarium specimen scans, Google Map stills, eBay purchases, etc.) function as both source material and evidence.

These works variously produce, contribute to, and repurpose archives—with the photographic image appearing across the process as subject, object, and documentation—in the service of building critical public discourse on political ecology and effecting environmental action, in solidarity with the diverse future-looking ecological positions held by the projects’ participants, whether engaged, hostile, anonymous, or other-than-human.

Amy Balkin's projects combine participation, action, and visual documentation to create large-scale, public, and long-term works. She has proposed alternatives for conceiving the public domain outside current legal and discursive systems, addressing property relations, environmental justice, and equity in the context of climate change in projects including ‘clean-air’ park Public Smog and Invisible-5, an environmental justice audio tour of California’s I-5 freeway corridor. 

She brings qualitative environmental data–photographs, maps, policy reports and archival materials–into public space in works like the Philadelphia ‘essay-billboard’ Area of Interest and in Reading the IPCC, a series of durational public readings and videos of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s climate science assessments. Her work has been exhibited widely, including in the FotoFest Biennial (Houston), and dOCUMENTA (13), and widely published on, including in Art in the Anthropocene (Open Humanities), Materiality (Whitechapel), and Critical Landscapes (UC Press). She lives in San Francisco.