Whenever Florence Iff travels to a new city, she will always visit its Natural History Museum. These institutions hold fossils and dioramas of animals and species, from extinct dinosaurs and dodos to the first emergent lifeforms of algae. By the end of the century, scientists have predicted that humans will be responsible for the annihilation of more than a tenth of plant and animal species. As Earth continues to move towards a sixth mass extinction, there is irony in the fact that we are simultaneously archiving our own destruction. In 100 years, will our museums proudly exhibit the remains of the flora and fauna that we have killed?
“It’s not just ironic, it’s cynical,” says Iff. “We know so much about the universe… We discover so many things. And yet we destroy it at the same time.” Iff’s most recent body of work, Days of Future Passed, is her response to this dichotomy. Back in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, the artist contracted a bacterial infection during a surgery. This was shortly after she finished her artistic investigation into oil, in which she traced its origins to bacteria. “I was really scared of dying… It made me aware of how life is composed of so many different things, and the most dangerous ones are the ones we don’t see… be it the tiniest or the biggest ones, like climate change.”
Days of Future Passed presents a series of digital collages of images from Iff’s archive. The artist is continuously collecting photos from her daily life, the Internet, newspapers, and free image libraries, building a vast archive of organisms, structures, and scenes that pique her interest. In her collages, man-made structures collide with fungi, dead animals, insects and the cosmos. “I always take pictures of stuff that interests me, and sometimes I don’t know why. All of a sudden, it comes together. I realize why I collected all of this algae and mold,” she says. “It’s about life and death.” The resulting tapestries serve as a record of “what once was, of how and why it was destroyed and archived.”
Iff has dedicated her practice to the climate crisis for the last 25 years. Her earlier work was more traditional black and white photography, but she soon found the medium was “too flat.” She began introducing color and collage into her approach while studying at New York’s International Center of Photography in the late 90s, and has found it to be more effective in talking about environmental crises. “Collage has many more levels,” she says. “The subject is so complex. It’s biodiversity, it’s climate change, social issues. You can’t show it in a single image.”
Every day the Earth is edging closer to its tipping point. In a news cycle increasingly plagued by war and natural disasters, it is natural to feel helpless. “That’s why I am totally devoted to activism, otherwise I would be so depressed,” says Iff. “I’ve been aware of [climate change] for 40 years, and the only way you can help yourself is by being creative and active, that’s the only hope—the only way to mentally survive this catastrophe.”
