Julius von Bismarck Talking to Thunder (Palm Tree), 2017

In late 2016 a large herd of reindeer was struck by lightning on the Hardangervidda mountain plateau in southern Norway. A day later Julius von Bismarck arrived to visit their corpses. The sad trophies of his journey comprise 130 antler tips harvested on the spot. Individually mounted on stainless-steel rods approximately the height of a reindeer’s head, the array of different sized and shaped horns offer a monument to the relentless brutality of nature. Talking to Thunder confronts the Western dogma of nature as a domain of innocence in need of protection with a competing image of nature as a punishing deity, a force which invariably devastates, which demands to be soothed and worshipped. In northern Colombia, a region of frequent and intense thunderstorms, the artist met a shaman named Taita of the Wiwa tribe, a survivor of a lightning strike that killed eleven members of his community. As is common in indigenous cosmologies of the Americas, the Wiwa speak of thunder as a person.