Ilhas Studio — Extraction: The Raft of the Medusa
Book design for Extraction: The Raft of the Medusa, a project by the artist Salomé Lamas.
Extraction: The Raft of the Medusa is a multidisciplinary project developed between 2019 and 2020, comprising four eponymous works: two films, an installation, and a publication.
In this publication, dark backgrounds and dramatic imagery play a key role, evoking ideas of crisis, survival, and rupture across environmental and political imaginaries.
About the project:
Extraction: The Raft of the Medusa is a meditation on humanity’s massive redesign of the planet and a dystopic pamphlet on the anthropocene. It portrays a brief moment of euphoria as the drifting occupants on the raft, hoping and praying to be rescued, appear to glimpse a possibility of salvation. We can almost hear the hoarse cries through which they attempt to draw attention to their desperate plight, mustering a final ounce of strength before the void. This is their last chance of survival. Extraction: the Raft of the Medusa refers to the colonial paradigm, worldview, and technologies that mark out regions of high biodiversity in order to reduce life to its conversion into a resource through capitalism, with an enormous environmental and social impact. It is an allegory for states of emergency in environmental policy, climate and migration, with an ethical-political purpose.
The text pages are marked by a blue gradient that functions as a visual pause, introducing a moment of suspension and reflection.
