SEBASTIAN
SARDI
From Sweden. Lives and works in Malmö.
It is an apocalyptic landscape. There are huge man-made craters everywhere that make up the visible landscape, the ground is burning, and a vast area is oozing of toxic gases, fires and smoke. In all of this people are digging in the soil with their bare hands. Coal is mined everywhere in Jharkhand, India, and large parts of it is sorted by hand. The locals call it; ”Black Diamond”.
There is a fragile balance between nature and mankind. A sense of discomfort is felt in the slow but seemingly unavoidable struggle towards the collapse of nature. The human inability to break patterns is painstakingly visible in these photographs, as we knowingly keep on extracting the ground beneath our own feet.
Sebastian Sardi began his work on photographing mines in 2008 after reading an article on how mining related injuries and deaths are systematically covered up by many authorities. Black Diamond is a close (self-)portrait of the people who work with extracting coal from the ground, as well as an exploration of our dualistic human nature and how one self relates to the outside world while being a part of it.
AUTHORS BIOGRAPHY
Sebastian Sardi was born in 1983 in Stockholm, Sweden. At the age of 22, he started taking classes in analogue photography at the Peoples University in Stockholm. In 2009 he moved to Denmark to study photography at Fatamorgana the Danish school of art and photography. In 2011 he received a Bachelor’s degree in Art History and Visual Studies. He published his first photo book “A Cirkusz” in 2012. Today Sebastian Sardi lives and works in Malmö and Copenhagen.
