What is The intimacy of extinction about?

This question defies any definitive answer. Instead the title hints at a thinking about the phenomenon of extinction and reflecting on the experience of extinction from a purely subjective perspective. The question What is the intimacy of extinction about in fact intends to approach a bigger phenomenological question: what is it like to live in the age of the 6th mass extinction.

The intimacy of extinction is a long term, phenomenological photo project made on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, a place renowned for its exceptional natural grandeur, and unprecedented environmental destruction.

Sumatra's once vast, contiguous forests, renowned for its spectacular biodiversity, have now been reduced to a handful of isolated nature reserves.

Nature reserves are strange things, they evoke a sense of permanence and impermanence at the same time. As the forest disappears the nature reserve appears. In a sense the nature reserve is a tangible and approachable manifestation of the age of the 6th mass extinction.

The image of the nature reserve discloses a truth concealed in the way time is perceived and described. Experiences are construed in a way coherent with the world (in) which we live and to which we always comport ourselves.

As Sumatra's forests have ´grown` into their present shape, they exert a calm presence over the surrounding lands.

Approaching the nature reserve reveals the inescapable, yet intimate reality of living in the ´age of the 6t mass extinction`.

marten slothouwer, 2025