Marina Vitaglione
Marina Vitaglione is a London-based visual artist, photo editor, and writer whose work explores environmental crises, weaving poetic and documentary approaches to reveal the invisible realities of the Anthropocene. Her series Air — cyanotype prints made from air pollution particles collected in London — has been shown in solo and group exhibitions. She is the author of Solastalgia (Overlapse, 2017), an image-text docufiction examining the impact of sea-level rise on Venice, developed during a year-long residency at Fabrica research centre in Treviso, Italy.
Marina's project will explore the impact of climate change on the Atacama Desert through the lens of astronomy — pairing the desert's rapid, visible drying and its endangered plant species with the deep time of starlight that has travelled for centuries to reach us. She'll work with damaged desert landscapes, at-risk plant species, and the observatories that make Atacama one of the best places on Earth to study the cosmos, combining her own photographs with archival astronomical images to build a multilayered visual record, while also experimenting with physical process — exposing photographic paper on-site to sun, heat, sand, and collected water, letting the desert itself mark the images before they're developed in London. The result will place a landscape changing within a human lifetime alongside light that has been travelling since long before we existed.