Solastalgia: Documenting disaster through interactive documentaryMain MenuHomeFire SeriesWater Series(Meta)reflectionsNavigation:A snapshot of the content of this project that can be used to navigate in a non-linear fashionBibliographyAbout the authorsThanksmonique tschofen TMUa6f08a24bf34f58cae1b84d81d2df391582b801fJolene Armstrong8d77d69c06e0564ab85f8d6d9cb65116c99ff272 Monique Tschofen and Jolene Armstrong
12025-02-13T18:34:45+00:00Ann Ludbrookcf053db6c70bf302215612c46fa602f0fb467915Watercolours of the apocaplypsemonique tschofen TMU26plain2025-05-13T02:22:14+00:00monique tschofen TMUa6f08a24bf34f58cae1b84d81d2df391582b801f
At the end of October 2024, a weather system stalled over Valencia Spain leaving 400 liters of rainfall per square meter in just eight hours. The infrastructure could not hold. Rivers burst their banks. Roads and bridges collapsed. The high speed train line and several commuter lines were disabled. Flooding "killed at least 335 people in Europe in 2024 and affected more than 410,000" according to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service and the World Meteorological Organization (Abnett 2025). A preliminary assessment by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food estimated that approximately 49,000 producers and 70,000 hectares of land were affected by the storm (CaixaBank Research 2024).
One way we come to know about the climate emergency is through eyewitness documentation on platforms like X. Short and decontextualized video clips of images of cars submerged or floating away or piled on top of each other were circulated from the instant they were made, and then appeared in major media platforms hours to days later. Disaster media forces our attention on the immediate, constant, undeniable impact of human activity on the earth.
And yet no action is neutral. While keeping us attuned and protecting our safety through the transmission of information, disaster media can teeter on an edge that poses further danger as a result of ptsd through exposure to graphic and unrelenting destruction, as well as through manipulation of people; loads of disinformation emerged during the Spanish flooding that lay the blame for the calamity everywhere but on climate change. During the North Carolina flooding in September of 2024, and the Eaton and Palisades fires in January of 2025, the same kinds of disinformation and misinformation were circulated. Slow violence, what Nixon describes as "violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales," (Nixon 2011, p. 2)demands a slow practice that "engage[s] the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence”(Nixon 2011, p. 2). I began a series of watercolour paintings I call the watercolours of the apocalpyse, based on images of flooding disasters from social media.I wondered what I might learn about water from what might be described as disaster media as I translated digital images to the surface of the page. What might each wet brushstroke let me see, feel, understand? This was a slow and meditative practice of translation and sitting with that involved studying disaster media on the app formerly known as Twitter closely, so spending time in a deeply politically toxic space, and then turning away from screen media to an analogue practice that was tactile, and felt extremely solitary and outside of the immediacy of the 24/7 time of contemporary media.
Water, in urban flooding, is at once a surface and a volume and a powerful force. At the surface, the water can look almost still, while underneath, swift currents are moving hazards like manholes or cars along with debris like trees, signs, dissolved pollutants, raw sewage, chemicals. All this invisible matter is not rendered in the tradition of Western painting. Perhaps the lesson was about striving to control the medium of water(color) and yet accepting its unpredictability. I observed water's power to dissolve particulate matter and spread it, to soak and evaporate. Perhaps the lesson was in noticing what's not there.
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Parks, Lisa, and Janet Walker. 2020. “Disaster Media: Bending the Curve of Ecological Disruption and Moving toward Social Justice.” Media+Environment 2 (1). https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.13474.) European Digital Media Observatory (EMDO). 2024. “Floods in Valencia: Main Disinformation Narratives and Phenomena.” EDMO (blog). November 4. https://edmo.eu/publications/floods-in-valencia-main-disinformation-narratives-and-phenomena/.
