Manifesting the Abstract

Even as the impact of climate crisis is becoming more evident each day, many of us still do not really understand or are aware of how the threat of climate change has reached our immediate environment.

In 2021, Development Dialogue Asia (DDA) and Communication for Change (C4C) conducted a survey of 3,490 respondents in Indonesia’s 34 provinces. The results found that although 88% of respondents have heard the term ‘climate change’, only half of that number were able to correctly define ‘climate change’. The DDA and C4C surveys concluded that most Indonesians feel climate change as something that is abstract, distant, as well as impersonal.

It is difficult to feel called upon and to take part in efforts to mitigate the climate crisis when we cannot see ourselves and our loved ones as those who will be directly affected by the crisis.

This issue of abstraction is what iklimku.org, as a digital platform that collects stories related to climate change with its various complexities, tries to bring closer. On its website, there are dozens of stories from all over Indonesia with varied focuses of attention. Some of them present causes of the accelerated pace of climate change, such as deforestation on a massive scale for the sake of oil palm plantations in Papua. Some others tell about the impacts of climate change on different aspects of life, such as rising sea levels that are undermining Java’s north coast, or changes in weather patterns that are detrimental to Aceh’s coffee farmers.

In all stories on iklimku.org, photography is given an important role to make the problems of climate crisis more comprehensible. It reflects the team’s belief that the visual medium has great power to influence readers. Photos reveal what happens in faraway places and give faces to those who are often considered as merely numbers in statistics.

In this exhibition, the photos are not always presented according to their respective stories as they appear on the website, but arranged in a sequence that are connected to each other to provide an overview of how particular issues are intertwined, present, and real in the larger frame of climate crisis.

Apart from showing images of destructive impacts as a reminder of what has happened and may still be happening, this exhibition also displays success stories from inspiring movements as hope, so we remain empowered in facing the biggest crisis that humanity is currently facing.

Curator,

Kurniadi Widodo