Excess exposed by Cristina de Middel and Bruno Morais

Cristina de Middel probably needs no introduction. Born in Spain in 1975, she shot to fame in 2012 with her self-published book The Afronauts. Visualising Zambia’s failed 1960s space programme via staged scenes and setups, it was a very different way of showing Africa and a playful provocation of documentary photography and its limits. Perhaps surprisingly, it was created after she’d spent ten years working as a photojournalist.

“I consider myself an documentary photographer but in a very loose way,” she tells BJP. “I try to explain with images my opinion on the world we live in. The opinion part is important as I believe truth can only be reached by the exposure to many different opinions. The more opinions you consume, the closer you get to anything true…at least when it comes to understanding what is going on in the world.

“Also, the situation is so complex now and there is so many layers that for me it is not enough to use as your material just what happens in front of the camera,” she continues. “You can see one million pictures of the war in Syria and still do not understand who are the good and the bad guys. Fiction and staging comes when reality not enough to explain itself.”

The Afronauts was a hit, quickly selling out and going on to be nominated for the Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize in 2013; images from the series were exhibited at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, FOAM in Amsterdam, and numerous other prestigious institutions and festivals around the world. De Middel followed up quickly with more work, including the books This is what hatred did (2014), Sharkification (2015), and Jan Mayen (2015), all of which also play with photography and reality. Again, perhaps surprisingly, de Middel went on to join Magnum Photos as a nominee in 2017.

31/40 – Fossil Fuels. Negotiations for the definitive replacement of the use of fossil fuels by renewable energy sources by 2050 are proceeding slowly but firmly. From the series Excessocenus © Cristina de Middel and Bruno Morais

“I was not asked to join the agency, I submitted my portfolio because I thought it is a very good place to start expanding traditional documentary and start enlarging our visions of the world,” she says. “I have nothing against photojournalism, I just think it is not enough and the validation that Magnum provides to my work is fundamental to eventually opening up the doors a little bit to new narratives and new ways to explain the world.

“I am extremely happy to have this opportunity to be part of Magnum because it is the dream of any photographer, but in my case it is also symbolic of things eventually changing towards a more open understanding of the potential of photography, when it comes to take record of the world.”

And this approach is clear in her recent project Excessocenus, made with Brazilian photographer Bruno Morais. Tackling excessive consumption and its parlous effect on the environment and on mental health, it uses brightly-coloured, staged images rather than the gritty photojournalism more familiar in this field.

10/40 – The Poles Melting. The collapsing of the Southern Pole ice caps as a result of global warming announces a significant raise of the sea level before the end of this century. According to the record of previous similar context that happened more than 125,000 years ago, the sea level could rise between 64 and 114cm by the year 2100 in the worst emission scenario listed by the UN. From the series Excessocenus © Cristina de Middel and Bruno Morais

Morais and de Middel met in Brazil when de Middel was shooting Sharkification and needed “someone to guide me through a favela”; realising they had much in common, they started working on a project called Elexú. Midnight at the crossroad, which will go on show at Rencontres d’Arles this year. They also applied for the Greenpeace Photo Award to get funding for another project, one that would both “shift the target audience for environmental reportage and also avoid any apocalyptic imagery”. This was the series that would become Excessocenus.

“It was very clear to us that we wanted to make two points with this series,” they explain. “On one hand we wanted to point out the culture of excess that is driving the planet to a total collapse, but on the other hand we also wanted to make a point about how this dramatic situation is normally presented to the audience.”

Starting by sketching out a list of all the environmental challenges caused by over-consumption, from global warming to deforestation, they quickly realised they wanted to include issues representing the mentality behind the problem – the rapacious financial markets, for example, or the sexualisation of girls. The finished result covers a phenomenal range of problems, creating a sense of excess that is, they say, also part of the point.

Winning the Greenpeace grant, de Middel and Morais to flew to Mozambique, where, working together, they aimed to create images to create “that did not blame anyone and that were also visually compelling”. What they were aiming at, they continue, was “the kind of image that could at first glance become a piece of advertising but with a second layer of understanding”.

19/40 – Wasteland. The global crisis of waste management is even more severe in developing countries, where the volume of waste collection does not even reach half of the amount produced. From the series Excessocenus © Cristina de Middel and Bruno Morais

“We avoided the literal representation of the problem because that’s how environmental crisis have traditionally been explained,” they tell BJP. “In our opinion these types of images are targeting the Western (developed) world audience, and it places the victims (in this case the Africans) as recipients of help and solidarity, with very little room to move from that label. In other words, most environmental photography is made to stimulate charity and compassion towards the same old continents that are always suffering from this drama, when we all know that the situation is much more complex than Africa, for instance, doing things wrong again.

“Our intention was to create a campaign for the African audience, a fake one because it will never really happen. This campaign points at the problems and challenges of this world but also turns them into agents of their own solutions and eventually of their own representation. All the project also sits on the base of an irony: Africa as the epicentre of all that can go wrong environmentally. Through exaggeration we try to reduce that premise to absurdity.”

The resulting work is bright and appealing, often using local people as models to act out scenarios. There’s a woman holding an umbrella riddled with holes as a way of speaking of the ongoing effects of ozone layer depletion, for example, and a child dripping with gold jewellery illustrating the problem of tax havens – the accompanying caption pointing out that half of the world’s wealth belongs to 0.7% of the adult population, a group comprised of Western white males.

13/40 – Ozone Layer. Some optimistic studies show a significant recovery of the Ozone layer situation that alarmed the world a few decades ago but we are still suffering from its impact. Skin cancer and melanoma is the most common type of the disease and the prediction announce a growing trend. From the series Excessocenus © Cristina de Middel and Bruno Morais

There are 40 images in total and the series is currently on show at the prestigious Coalmine institution in Winterthur, Switzerland, but it also lives online in a specially-commissioned website, https://excessocenus.com Designed by Guillermo Brotons and developed by Frederik Delmotte, the website is also bright and appealing, the word “Excessocenus” scrolling and moving in the background, and the images popping up randomly and multiplying themselves.

Accompanying noises, such as a woman screaming along with a shot on the psychological impact of beauty standards, add to the fun but also to the slightly queasy sense of excess. It’s a case of form following function, and, add Morais and de Middel, has the added advantage of open access.

“Instead of a critical reportage that shows a certain miserable reality around environment, we decided to make a fake campaign and talk about all the problems there are in the world,” they say. “That is why we needed a website, a platform that would potentially allow us to go viral. It doesn’t make much sense to launch a campaign in a gallery with exhibition prints; with the website we can reach a wider audience.

08/40 – Animal Cloning. Research is underway to produce genetically modified animals for consumption, but studies are still uncertain about possible effects on the consumer’s health and the environment. From the series Excessocenus © Cristina de Middel and Bruno Morais

“Once that was clear we started working with Guillermo and Frederik to design and programme the website. Everything was made with the same spirit of the exhibition – trying to convey excess with both the rhythm of the images and the amount of information. The website has no menu, it has a very random navigation and creates by itself, if you do not interact at all, a multilayered experience of accumulation.”

I ask how many people the website has reached, and de Middel replies mischievously – playfully warping reality, in the spirit of this project and her work more widely. “100 million people already,” she says, “but I am certainly exaggerating.”

Excessocenus is on show at COALMINE Forum for Documentary Photography and the COALMINE Space for Contemporary Photography until 07 April www.coalmine.ch https://excessocenus.com www.lademiddel.com www.nobruno.com/en/

30/40 – Ocean Contamination. According to the UN, about 90% of all garbage floating in the sea is composed of plastic. If the picture of ocean degradation is not reversed, by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the sea, and 99% of seabirds will have ingested this type of material. From the series Excessocenus © Cristina de Middel and Bruno Morais
27/40 – Deforestation. Scientists already announced a new geological era caused any man’s action on the planet: Anthropocenus. The intensive use of fire is still one of the main causes for the diminution of green areas and for global warming. Over 3.5 million square km of burned areas were detected in the year 2000, of which approximately 80% occurred in areas described as woodlands and shrublands. From the series Excessocenus © Cristina de Middel and Bruno Morais
05/40 – Garment Manufacture. Globalisation has made it possible to produce clothing at increasingly low prices, prices so low that many consumers consider this clothing to be disposable. The increasing use of man made textiles has a strong impact on the environment, especially from one of the most common fibres in the fast clothing industry, polyester. From the series Excessocenus © Cristina de Middel and Bruno Morais
01/40 – Mining. The extractive sector – mining, oil and gas – is the main obstacle to achieving the goals of the UN Agenda 2030, such as eradicating poverty, guaranteeing clean water and sanitation or all, and preserving land life. From the series Excessocenus © Cristina de Middel and Bruno Morais
04/40 – Financial Markets. Financial speculation causes more socio-environmental damage than climate change in developing countries. According to the UN, massive flux of patrimony from countries with no economic impact on the local community is one of the main reasons for the unequal world we live in. From the series Excessocenus © Cristina de Middel and Bruno Morais
37/40 – The Media. The almost total concentration of written, audiovisual and electronic media makes it difficult to propagate any political and ideological views that disagree with the current model of contemporary development. From the series Excessocenus © Cristina de Middel and Bruno Morais
Diane Smyth

Diane Smyth is the editor of BJP, returning for a second stint on staff in 2023 - after 15 years on the team until 2019. As a freelancer, she has written for The Guardian, FT Weekend Magazine, Creative Review, Aperture, FOAM, Aesthetica and Apollo. She has also curated exhibitions for institutions such as The Photographers Gallery and Lianzhou Foto Festival. You can follow her on instagram @dismy