SALZBURG.- From February 6 to April 4, 2026, FOTOHOF becomes a meeting point for urgent questions about the future of the planet. With the exhibition “Project Groundswell: Visions for Climate Action,” the Salzburg-based institution presents a powerful selection of contemporary photography and film that moves beyond documenting catastrophe and instead asks a more difficult question: What can be done?
Developed in collaboration with three other European photography institutions—Cortona On The Move, Imago Lisboa, and Photo Museum Ireland—Project Groundswell is a Creative Europe–funded initiative that brought together artists from across the continent through an open call. Out of 400 submissions, an international jury selected 12 projects that confront climate change not only as a global emergency, but as a social, cultural, and ethical challenge.
Rather than overwhelming visitors with images of destruction alone, the exhibition deliberately foregrounds ideas of resistance, adaptation, memory, and regeneration. Film and photography become tools for reflection—and potential catalysts for action.
From protest to planetary memory
One of the central projects on view is “Eviction” by Ingmar Björn Nolting, a searing photographic series documenting the eviction of the village of Lützerath in Germany. Once occupied by climate activists and transformed into a symbol of resistance against coal mining, the village became the stage for a dramatic confrontation between environmental protest, political compromise, and industrial power.
Nolting’s images capture moments of tension and vulnerability: activists chained together, barricades built from debris, police units advancing street by street. Yet beyond the clashes, the work also records a fragile sense of community—shared meals, improvised structures, collective rituals. What emerges is not only a chronicle of loss, but a visual testimony to a generation’s struggle for climate justice, and the emotional weight of seeing a utopian experiment dismantled.
Living with fire in Portugal
While Nolting documents a conflict rooted in political decision-making, Gonçalo Fonseca turns his lens toward a slower, recurring catastrophe. In “A Burning Landscape,” Fonseca reflects on the wildfires that have devastated central Portugal for decades—fires that have intensified dramatically with climate change.
The project is deeply personal. Fonseca grew up in the affected region, where his family orchard was destroyed by fire in 2017. His photographs show scorched hillsides, abandoned land, and communities forced to rebuild again and again. But the work also looks forward, documenting innovative reforestation efforts, community-led restoration projects, and new approaches to forest management that combine local knowledge with long-term ecological planning.
Rather than treating fire as an unavoidable natural disaster, Fonseca reveals it as a symptom of human intervention—monoculture plantations, rural depopulation, and neglected land—while also pointing toward models of recovery that unfold over generations, not news cycles.
Listening to the ocean
In “The Ocean Within,” Irish artist Yvette Monahan takes a more poetic, research-driven approach. Drawing on marine science, Monahan explores fish as living archives—creatures whose bodies record time, migration, and environmental change through otoliths and scales, much like tree rings.
Her work asks unsettling questions: if fish carry the memory of the ocean, what happens when species disappear? What knowledge is lost when ecosystems collapse? Through images and text, The Ocean Within reframes marine life not as a resource, but as a form of collective planetary memory. The project quietly challenges viewers to reconsider humanity’s place within ecological systems—and to recognize the ocean not as a backdrop to life on Earth, but as one of its regulating cores.
Preserving life beyond industrial logic
A different sense of time and care shapes “Bone Foam” by Maria Oliveira. Developed in the rural region of Alto Minho in northern Portugal, the project focuses on subsistence farming communities where daily life still follows seasonal rhythms and intimate knowledge of land, water, and animals.
Oliveira pays particular attention to the role of women, who sustain these micro-economies through cultivation, animal care, and food production. Her images portray this labor not as nostalgia, but as a form of resistance—an alternative to extractive, capitalist systems that dominate modern food production. As such communities slowly disappear due to aging populations and economic pressure, Bone Foam becomes both a document and a quiet argument for preserving spaces where different relationships to nature remain possible.
A broader conversation
Alongside the four main award-winning projects, Project Groundswell includes a projection program featuring works by artists such as Oliver Ressler, Nora Schwarz, Marco Buratti, Chloé Azzopardi, and Adam Sébire. These films and photo-based works address forests, water scarcity, climate negotiations, technological promises, and rising sea levels, expanding the exhibition into a multi-voiced reflection on sustainability.
An exhibition on the move
After opening at FOTOHOF in Salzburg, Project Groundswell will travel to Dublin, Tuscany, and Lisbon, reinforcing its transnational perspective. The tour underscores one of the exhibition’s central messages: climate change is not a local issue, and neither are its solutions.
