While we spend our entire life on or right above the Earth’s surface, we don’t normally think about what lies below. The Rubenstein Library’s “Rift/Fault” exhibit seeks to change that by drawing our attention to the places where tectonic plates meet, in hopes of making people think about borders, both imaginary and real.
Tectonic plates are the broken up pieces of the lithosphere, Earth’s outermost layer, which move alongside and against each other over time. Their interaction is responsible for countless geological formations, ranging from fault lines and valleys to the Himalaya and Andes mountain ranges.
“Rift/Fault” highlights these plates, exhibiting features from Marion Belanger’s book of the same name. In it, Belanger, an accomplished photographer of human interactions with the environment, presents photographs of Iceland’s Mid-Atlantic rift and California’s San Andreas Fault. In this project, she put the Earth and its environment in conversation, while capturing the differences between Earth’s real borders and humanity’s imaginary ones.
The exhibit itself is split between two sections featuring Iceland and California. The photos of Iceland are largely colorless, with a light smattering of muted foliage and grass. While many photos contain signs of human presence like greenhouses, homes, pipes and fish farms, only one features humans, who appear small in the face of the enormous backdrop. The overall feeling is of barrenness, but it is not lifeless, with fog and mist everywhere and unending attempts to tame nature in process. The fog and mist feel symbolic of the exhibit as a whole, which draws focus towards the overall message: the environment is more than just something people interact with.
Across from the wall with Belanger’s brief bio, the photos transition from rift to fault. An immediate change is evident, as the California photo feels livelier than the Icelandic one. California, too, feels barren but in a very different way. Many of the photos focus on human constructs, but without people, presenting humans as an afterthought. There are broken walls, old fences, vast neighborhoods, signs and roads, many juxtaposed against small bits of nature. Here, people again appear sparsely, generally dwarfed by the environment around them.
In addition to the photos, there’s a small case in the middle, connecting the humanities with geology. The pieces here are all publications of the Duke Press and highlight issues like the role geology played in the formation of racial categories and the politicalization of geologic research. This section enriches the exhibit, connecting it to common social concerns about bias in science and topics from the philosophy of science like the idea of value-free science. For example, some geologists and entire areas of geological inquiry sought to justify race and race-based discrimination instead of searching for truth.
The exhibit is the brainchild of Caitlin Kelly, curator of the Rubenstein Library’s Archive of Documentary Arts. Kelly has regularly engaged with Belanger’s work, including as a teaching material in MFA classes. When making the exhibit, she was struck by “the idea that we prioritize the human” according to an email she sent the Duke Chronicle and sought out art that discussed the environment without focusing exclusively on human perspectives.
Kelly’s favorite portion of the exhibit is two photos, Rift 22 and Fault 19, which mark the transition from Iceland to California. This happened to be my favorite set also, as it focuses the reader on what connects and differentiates the two regions.
Overall, the exhibit is brief but enjoyable, capable of being studied thoroughly or briefly examined. It talks about the environment in a way that centers both short term fluctuations and long term trends through aesthetically pleasing photos that provide detail without being overwhelming. The art also highlights the existence of man-made environmental features, and the ways in which human built environments interact with natural ones. Outside of environmental themes, the pieces also brings to mind the arbitrariness of human-created borders in the face of natural, human ones.
Given its aesthetic and educational value and the ease of accessing it, I recommend everyone stop by and check out the exhibit some time in the next few months. It is well worth it.
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Zev van Zanten is a Trinity junior and recess editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.