After Nature Prize 27

In her new project, Jamilah Sabur (b. 1987, Jamaica) explores personal and historical connections between the parish of Westmoreland in Jamaica and Scotland. The project begins with the story of her grandfather, who sprayed chemicals for the Frome Sugar Factory to combat malaria in the mid-twentieth century. Sabur uses these operations, initially organized by the British military and later by international health programs, as the springboard for her investigation of how medicine, the sugar industry, and environmental factors impacted the health of Jamaican workers. Using historical printing processes, she opens up a new perspective that looks beyond the colonial narratives of fighting disease.

In her new work, Yuyan Wang (b. 1989, China) investigates the uncanny presence of nature in a contemporary reality that is dictated by fossil-based resources. The setting is a center of artificial plant production in southern China, where durable and deceptively realistic leaves, flowers, and trees are created for use as decoration in shopping malls, offices, and amusement parks all over the world. Wang follows the material cycles and asks how our understanding of nature changes as real plants are increasingly being replaced by industrially produced replicas. In the video installation, documentary footage is combined with fictional moments. Wang focuses particularly on the repetitive hand movements of the workers, where the boundaries between body, material, and machine become blurred.

These prizewinning project proposals will be implemented for the first time as part of the After Nature . Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize 27.

A joint project by C/O Berlin x Crespo Foundation.