Interview by Erika Giulietti
All Images © Ana Zibelnik
Ana Zibelnik (b. 1995) is a visual artist and photographer from Ljubljana, Slovenia and based in The Hague, Netherlands. She holds an MA in Film and Photographic Studies from Leiden University and a BA in Visual Communication Design from the University of Ljubljana.
Since 2020, Ana has been part of an artist duo with Jakob Ganslmeier, working on photography and video projects which address topics such as climate anxiety, online trends, and the impact of extreme ideologies on young people. Through sharing their visual work and conducting visual literacy workshops, they aim to amplify the often overlooked voices of young adults and contribute to reducing societal polarization.
Ana’s work has been exhibited at Foam, Photo Basel and Verzasca Foto Festival among others.
Erika Giulietti (EG): Dear Ana, thank you for being here. First thing first, to get into your practice, how would you define your use of photography as a tool?
Ana Zibelnik (AZ): Thanks for having me! My relationship with photography and how I articulate images is constantly changing, sometimes from one project to another, which is why I would say it is not very strictly defined. In a way, all these different visual languages and ways of telling a story are also what keeps me interested. I always like to shape the visual language around the subject matter.
When I started photography, I thought of it as a weakness and that my work would never have the distinct, recognizable visual style I so admired in other photographers. It’s not that I don’t have a way of photographing that feels natural; it’s more that once I discovered what ‘my’ images supposedly looked like, it wasn’t fun to create them anymore. I wanted to try something new, and so I ended up switching to digital, using off-camera flash and shooting in color. Since I’ve been working as part of an artist duo with Jakob Ganslmeier, I’ve also engaged a lot with video. We just finished a new work, Bereitschaft, which recently premiered at Foam, and the process involved more creative coding than video editing. It was again an entirely new way of working with images.
(EG): In light of this, do you believe that your practice will ever converge in the use of a single definitive aesthetic?
(AZ): Eventually, I made peace with the disparate aesthetics of my work and realized that no matter how different the projects may look, they often start from the same impulses. The principles, as well as the goals that drive them are consistent. Still, I have tremendous respect for the artists who made their particular way of seeing their life’s work, without becoming repetitive.
(EG): Let’s focus on a project of yours. Could you share the inspiration behind “Immortality Is A Common Place“?
(AZ): When the idea of “Immortality is Commonplace” first came to life, I was fully immersed in the academic environment, finishing my master’s degree in photography theory. Having just completed We are The Ones Turning, a project deeply engaged with the human experience of death and mortality, I wanted to explore photography as a medium that wasn’t solely focused on death.
I vividly remember reading a line in the introduction to Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: “Lichen are ghosts that haunt us from the past, but they also peer at us from a future without us.” It made me realize that there are organisms in our landscapes that are very small and appear very still, offering very little of their life to capture photographically. When you look at lichens, which I then learned are biologically immortal or extremely durable, there is hardly ever a moment to ‘catch.’ And yet, they store information about the world for hundreds of years, far beyond a human lifespan. They grow extremely slowly, and certain species are remarkably resistant to extreme weather conditions. This is largely due to their symbiotic composition. If one part dies off, the other takes over and keeps the organism alive.
Still, with the threat of an environmental collapse, this resilience cannot be taken for granted. My idea was to show the tension between photography as a medium that is supposed to immortalize and preserve, and the subject (lichens) that could hypothetically, under ideal conditions, outlive the concept of photography itself, let alone any physical photograph. I used them as a metaphor for the precariousness of the times we live in.
(EG): Your project touches upon the concept of living in the end times. What led you to explore this theme through your photography?
(AZ): I’ve always had a fascination with the idea of the end of the world. At the same time, I realize this is a sort of fantasy, and the ‘end’ is a painfully slow process. I suspect this is a feeling many past generations shared, but the acceleration of disasters and the normalization of extreme events in the last ten years seems unprecedented. It gives the impression of living at a turning point.
After a certain age, probably in my late teenage years, I became preoccupied with the constant thought that I might be doing simple, everyday things for the last time. It’s silly, but this was about the same time I got into photography. Later on, I read Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič, who wrote a brilliant book about the concept of an end. She argues that the end is not actually something final but always repeating itself. It can only exist in a cycle of repetition, which is a thought you could also apply to the concept of extinction.
I don’t want to sound cynical, but thinking of extinction as a generative process, a process in which something always emerges and continues can be comforting. Still, as much as it is an interesting intellectual exercise, it should by no means be an excuse to postpone any action in tackling, for example, the climate crisis.
(EG): The project also suggests a convergence of human and planetary time. How do you visually represent this intersection in your work?
(AZ): Perhaps I can answer this with an image of the Hunebedden, the prehistoric tombstones scattered around the province of Drenthe in the Netherlands. They are thousands of years old human-made structures and they are covered in huge lichens. Considering that lichens grow less than a millimetre per year on average, their massive circular growth on these dolmens can seriously unsettle your perception of time.
Reflecting on Immortality is Commonplace some time after its completion, and to be completely honest, I do not always feel the same sense of bewilderment that I experienced during its production when looking at the images. What speaks to me more are the portraits of young people, specifically the very brief moment of youth they are in and that their faces emanate. These portraits, set against the extremely still landscapes, for me, capture the mentioned contrast much more clearly.
(EG): Are there any particular emotions or messages you hope viewers take away from experiencing your photographic project?
(AZ): I always hope that my images will have an emotional effect on people — it’s the only way I know to make impactful work. In Immortality is Commonplace, this was perhaps the biggest challenge. The strongly theoretical underpinning of the work and trying to create images as visual arguments made it somewhat difficult to get close to viewers. I didn’t struggle with finding motives or producing good looking images as much as with their coldness. I was missing a human component. The project came together after a short pause when I attended an artist residency in Lithuania in 2022, led by Jim Goldberg. During this time, I started working with people again, especially people in their early 20s and younger, asking them about their perceptions of the world, fear of the climate crisis, and the idea of ‘living in the end times.’ Eventually, the portraits gave the strongest expression to the thoughts behind this work.
(EG): In your opinion, what does it mean to be human in the face of rapid climate change?
(AZ): This is a question I ask myself a lot, and yet I don’t have any answers. I only know how it feels to be young and to live without any expectation or certainty of your future. Through Fault Line, Jakob Ganslmeier and I dealt extensively with the idea of eco-anxiety, interviewing and photographing people between 16 and 24, many of them part of climate activist movements. For many young people, experiencing this level of uncertainty before their identity is fully formed can be quite transformative. I’ve seen people drop out of school and completely devote their lives to activism because it felt that existential. At the same time, I’ve read so often that being anxious about the climate and taking part in activism is a thing of privileged societies. Which is true, because you need to be able to afford to be climate conscious. When you live in a conflict zone and fear for your life daily, you most likely don’t think about the climate. But at the same time, I think what is equally dangerous as failing to acknowledge this privilege and its implications is dismissing a problem such as climate anxiety as not serious enough. Saying that these kids are just ‘too sensitive’.
I feel like we live in a society where things tend to be measured against the highest degree of evil, or to the worst possible scenario. But does it make for a healthy society to dismiss any issue, especially concerning the youth, only because there is even bigger misery somewhere else? We cannot always work in such hierarchies of human emotions, labelling some as valid while completely neglecting others. With Fault Line, people sometimes ask us why we choose to focus on Europe and not for example on countries in the Global South with considerably less resources in battling the climate crisis. One of the reasons for this is that we are particularly interested in how different societal crises overlap and how the climate crisis basically acts as a threat multiplier. We are less interested in the environmental tipping points (in the context of the project) than in societal ones. When is Europe going to crack? Are we going to be able to overcome the ever-larger polarization and find a narrative that we can collectively strive for?
Images below from the series Fault Line by Ana Zibelnik and Jakob Ganslmeier
Fault Line is an ongoing photographic project portraying the impact of the climate crisis in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, emphasizing the need to contemplate society’s responses.
