After Nature (Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize 2024 Laura Huertas Millán and Sarker Protick)

After Nature is a joint project of the C/O Berlin Foundation and the Crespo Foundation. Every year, the prize honours artists who explore new concepts of nature in photography and other visual media through their work. The accompanying publication presents the work of the fi rst two prizewinners. Laura Huertas Millán (born 1983, Colombia) deals with the cultural, medicinal and ritual applications of the coca plant long before cocaine was fi rst produced in nineteenth-century Europe. Based on the prohibition of the plant in the course of the Spanish colonisation of Latin America, she develops a speculative narrative centred on a group of women who secretly distributed coca leaves in the seventeenth century. The artist uses fi ction as a strategy, imagining a fragmentary narrative about the colonial appropriation of nature and the resistance to it. Sarker Protick (born 1986, Bangladesh) focuses on the historical territory of Bengal, which today extends across India and Bangladesh. In his pictures, he translates his examination of the colonial history of the British Empire into a photographic investigation of the present. He is interested in the expansion of railroad connections and coal mining in the nineteenth century. Travelling through Bangladesh and India, he creates a body of photographs that addresses the global, geopolitical and historical dimensions of imperialism as a key driver of the climate crisis.