John Peter Askew, Boy by River 2017

With an essay by Elena Zaytseva

Hope

“To change the world we need to change the stories we tell about it”, the author of this photograph wrote in his book We. What could represent the hope for a changing world better than a picture of a child running towards a river, under a vast summer sky, impatient to start playing, his tossed hair curling in a chord with the clouds, his elbows and knees habitually grazed, his movements nimble, his breath full of excitement of forthcoming adventures? Looking at this photograph we, spectators, are brought to look in the same direction as the child, see the same horizon that he sees — a narrow line far away, where the vast sky, reflected in the broad river, meets the green grass on the other bank. The horizon we share with this boy is wide and clear and hopeful.

One of the surprising outcomes of the present moment is that we started to think about the future with hope. We have passed the stage when, at the beginning of lockdown, we were delving into archives and ruminating on the past. Now, more and more, debates address the future. The months before the pandemic were marked by the powerful and heroic Extinction Rebellion protests, billowing around the world, but the ways we addressed the future were full of despair. We knew that we were ruining the future of our children, that we were overheating the planet we live on. We were sure that, from one deadline to another, we were rushing towards the abyss of global catastrophe beyond repair, but we didn’t believe that it would be possible to somehow avoid the catastrophe. Today, the fresh air and butterflies in London are bringing us into a much more hopeful mode of thinking about the future.

Perhaps naively and wrongly, but since we were forced to stop and stay at home, some of us find ourselves making plans to restart our lives without the flaws of the past. Our thinking of the future once more has acquired a utopian dimension - but, unlike the modernist dream of a universal order of collective happiness, the future we envisage is more about increasing personal choice and connecting with local communities. Despite this, we can’t avoid thinking globally.

At the height of the epidemic in Paris, Bruno Latour published an article titled ‘What protective measures can you think of so we don’t go back to the pre-crisis production model?’. Its tone is full of hope: “To every ecologist’s argument about changing our ways of life, there was always the opposing argument about the irreversible force of the ‘train of progress’ that nothing could derail ‘because of globalisation’, they would say. And yet it is precisely its globalised character that makes this infamous development so fragile, so likely to do the opposite and come to a screeching halt.”

Latour points out that it is not only multinationals and tour operators that globalise the planet. The pandemic has shown us how fast we pass tiny droplets of infection to our personal contacts — that all humans around the world are connected by the droplets of their breath.

This stunning discovery raises the stakes of our personal choices. Coming to a ‘new normality’ after lockdown we will have to make hundreds of choices about work, eating, dressing up, travelling, and educating our children. And we are aware now that our personal choices could have a global impact, and also of the possibility of connecting with everybody else in the world to make positive changes. And art can show us the horizon of change — this is one of its major tasks.

Elena Zaytseva 

Elena Zaytseva is curator of the current Pushkin House exhibition, ‘We. Photographs from Russia 1996-2017’ by John Peter Askew.