As part of Foto Wien 2022, documentary and reportage photographer Fabian Weiss is showing images from his visit to the "Volunteer Forest Firefighters in Siberia", which was organized in collaboration with Greenpeace.
The exhibition was curated by Walter Seidl.

March 11 to April 1, 2022
Wed - Fri: 2 - 6 p.m.
1080 Vienna, Strozzigasse 36

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With 809 million hectares, Russia is the most densely forested country on earth. Nowhere else are there such large, contiguous coniferous forests. Every year, devastating, mostly man-made fires occur on several million hectares there. The large-scale infernos destroy the vegetation and endanger the rural population. Dozens are killed and the extent is usually concealed or downplayed by the government. Across Russia, for example, around 85,000 square kilometres burned in 2016, which is roughly equivalent to the national territory of Austria.

The connection between humans and nature is out of control here and in many other places in the world, and man-made climate change is further fuelling the dissonance. Living together in times of the Anthropocene needs to be rethought and can take an example from the commitment of volunteer firefighters in eastern Russia.

These groups organise themselves via social media and drive out into the forests with primitive equipment to improvise life-threatening frontline firefighting. It is mainly the peat fires that pose a danger to humans through smoke and fire, usually spreading undetected in the ground for kilometres in drained areas. The white trunks of the birch trees are black underneath, giant trees with charred roots topple over. Underneath lies the peat, up to 600 degrees hot.

Fabian Weiss' photographs document the work of volunteers in Siberia in eastern Russia. As early as 2016, he learned about the ignorance of the population and the widespread spread of fires around the megacity of Irkutsk, where the weather forecast did not indicate rain or sun - but smoke. He then accompanied local firefighting teams for several weeks on missions to extinguish peat fires and a training camp on Lake Baikal.

Fabian Weiss (*1986) works as a photographer and visual artist in Austria, Germany, Eastern Europe and further east. His personal projects mostly deal with the question of how global change is reflected in everyday and personal structures.

In his work, Fabian Weiss mostly deals with people who live on the margins of the world and whose issues and challenges are not the focus of global attention. These issues are not only important for them and their lives, but also for the survival of us all on this planet. They are about global warming (forest fires in Siberia), the interruption of migration routes by building walls (USA-Mexico), but also the empowerment of women in male domains (Tibetan women's soccer team in exile). Fabian Weiss directs the focus of his lenses to areas that usually remain underexposed or lie in the blind spot of global communicative perception.

On view from
March 11 to April 1, 2022
Wed - Fri: 2 - 6 p.m.
1080 Vienna, Strozzigasse 36