From Artist Richard Renaldi about his collection, Disturbed Harmonies:
Men are troubled across this troubled Earth. Economic and political power have failed to assuage their anxiety. Physical strength offers only the illusion of protection. Although male supremacy was never foreordained, either by history or biology, the obsessions of powerful men have haunted the past and reshaped the natural world.
What is the source of this disquiet? Is it that men are more likely than women to commit and to suffer acts of deadly violence, to be conscripted into military combat, to be jailed, subjected to corporal punishment, or executed? Is it their lower life expectancy? Perhaps the scriptural mandate to have dominion over every moving thing upon the earth was a bit too much pressure. Modern biblical scholars, working with newer, more accurate translations of the ancient Hebrew texts, have established that the term ‘ādām — the first inhabitant of the garden, commanded “to dress it and to keep it” — is not a proper noun, but rather a generic word meaning “human.” The term is not gendered male. Yet centuries of mistranslation abetted a tilt in men’s favour.
New threads of archaeological and anthropological inquiry — as well as new ways of reading old data — have begun to reveal that male-dominated societies are relatively modern inventions. The exact mechanisms by which men have arrogated power over the last few thousand years are not fully understood, however. For now, literature and art must fill the narrative gaps. The loss of paradise seems to have triggered an anger-displacement syndrome from which proceeded millennia of burning, chopping, mining, damming, slaughtering, shooting, conquering, and otherwise disturbing the earth and its creatures.
From herbs and fruits grew thistles and thorns. In 1864, at the height of the US Civil War, the American conservationist and diplomat George Perkins Marsh published Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. He argued that there was impending danger in man’s assumption that he had triumphed over nature. Five years earlier, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had explained where humans had come from; Man and Nature foretold where they were going. Marsh wrote that man was “breaking up the floor and wainscoting and doors and window frames of our dwelling.” Ninety eight years before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and over a century before Exxon scientists quietly proved the growing threat of anthropogenic climate change, and then invoked a silence to which they had no right, Marsh argued that man was the prime “disturber of nature’s harmonies.”
My photographs represent Marsh’s disturbed harmonies. They express an artist’s desire to pull men back into parallel with a natural world from which they have gone badly out of true. Each diptych is an equivalent, every face an enigmatic globe whose geographies, histories, and political divisions challenge us to interrogate more fully their tectonic pressures. For centuries, ancient instruments like astrolabes and orreries described the shape and station of the known world. We may have forgotten how to read them, but they still point towards home.
See Renaldi’s Disturbed Harmonies photos here
