Dispatches from the Collapse
It’s funny, isn’t it, how there is a world of difference being in a rut and being in the groove? In one, your life is going nowhere. In the other you’ve struck some sort of creative vein, and mining it is pure joy. Well, normally. But in the case of my project, Dispatches from the Collapse, the ideas and images that came together in 2019, were anything but joyful. I found myself as midwife to a pretty ugly litter. What’s worse, though, is that I’ve revisited and re-tested the assumptions I made when I delivered them and, each one seem, well, depressingly hale and hearty.
Here’s the project’s description:
“When I made the images in this series, hope was far from my mind. Rather, I imagined the pictures as relics found in a drawer in an abandoned house, decades from now. The imagery and messages attached to them are from an earlier period, just as an unspecified collapse was getting under way. The words are rueful, sometimes even bitter, often with an unspoken “I told you so”. In them I draw attention to a wide range of post- collapse scenarios with a view, in part, to highlight our current naivety and abject lack of preparedness for what is to come.”
Don’ let that put you off listening, please! You can always challenge my ideas…
Dispatches from the Collapse
Niall Benvie
The images from Dispatches from the Collapse [https://www.benvieart.eu/dispatches]
The spread of misinformation on social media [https://www.apa.org/topics/journalism-facts/how-why-misinformation-spreads]
Risks of hyper-connectivity [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391491997_Hyperconnectivity_and_its_negativities#:~:text=Key%20issues%20that%20users%20in,mental%20health%20and%20cognitive%20functions.]
Reasons for rising sea levels [https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level#:~:text=The%20rising%20water%20level%20is,record%20(1993%2Dpresent).]
Growth in size of cars [https://www.forbes.com/sites/we-dont-have-time/2025/08/17/carbesity--how-cars-get-bigger-and-heavier-and-why-it-matters/]
Decline of flying insects in Germany [https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0185809#:~:text=Our%20results%20document%20a%20dramatic,2012%20%5B56%2C%2057%5D.]
Paul Kingsnorth Life versus the Machine [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/27/against-the-machine-paul-kingsnorth-book-review]
Derrick Jensen on psychopathy [https://derrickjensen.org/endgame/psychopathology/]
Greta Thunberg activism [https://journalse.com/young-activists-as-international-norm-entrepreneurs-a-case-study-of-greta-thunbergs-campaigning-on-climate-change-in-europe-and-beyond/]
Populist isolationism [https://www.populismstudies.org/Vocabulary/populist-isolationism/]
Environmentally-induced migration [https://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fileid=17719&lang=en]
Derrick Jensen and hope [https://derrickjensen.org/endgame/hope/]
