For their series Excessocensus, artists Cristina de Middel and Bruno Morais sought to find new audiences for environmental reportage without relying on apocalyptic imagery. Instead they focused on a culture of excess, approaching future environmental disasters as the collective result of historical exploitation and overconsumption. As the African continent has become a target market for low quality and highly toxic products with few plans to manage the “after party” of excessive consumption, de Middel and Morais decided to visualize the effects of macroeconomics into African micro-routines.

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The photographic project was going to be exhibited at the Coalmine Museum. For this particular exhibition, we were asked to create a digital home for this outstanding body of work. But the site had a dual purpose: it needed to function as both a website where users could browse the photographs and it had to become a working projection for the exhibition space. 

We imagined the website as a potential video projection in the space. If left alone, the site will animate in unexpected ways, emphasizing chaos through auditory and visual effects to communicate the excess and dysfunction of the original body of work.

Tackling excessive consumption and multiple environmental issues, we enjoyed how this body of work uses unexpected brightly-colored, staged images rather than the gritty photojournalism more familiar in this field.