Overshoot #13: Yogan Muller with Karolina Karlic – Lenscratch

Hevea brasiliensis (Rubber Tree Canopy), Michelin Rubber Plantation, Bahia, Brazil. Archival pigment print, 42 × 52 ½ in. © Karolina Karlic.

Archives, fieldwork, instructing, directing a brand new MFA program, piloting a climate-conscious coalition throughout the UC system, directing Unseen California, contributing to a competition for Earth Day at UCSC, Karolina Karlic’s apply and ecological engagement have lengthy been a deep supply of inspiration.

In her ongoing Rubberlands sequence, the artist’s delicate, affected person, and humanistic photographic apply is on full show. The land, the bushes, the individuals, the structure, the archival analysis, and the photographic experiments type a connective tissue akin to the ramifications of rubber extraction and manufacturing the artist traces throughout continents.

Karolina Karlic’s work appeared on my radar as I used to be ending a practice-based PhD in images in Brussels, Belgium. At that point, I used to be fleshing out like-minded theories of images’s position in bringing us into the ecological disaster and the geological image of the Anthropocene. I vividly keep in mind watching Lightwork’s video presentation of Rubberlands on the coronary heart of a chilly Belgian winter, most likely in February/March of 2018. The incontrovertible fact that I used to be capable of watch this video removed from the place it was made and the varied locations Karlic photographed in Rubberlands, is a maybe testomony to the very dynamics of globalization.

What follows is an alternate I had with Karolina over e-mail and in a summer season 2026 marked by a growing El Niño occasion, marine heatwaves in Southern California, and catastrophic wildfires again to SW France the place I grew up and the place my ecological consciousness and engagement stems from.

 

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Yogan Muller (YM):
Karolina, we’re UC colleagues chatting in the course of the summer season, a time lecturers cherish for relaxation, dreaming, and dealing on private initiatives. Can you give us a glimpse into what you’re at present cooking up?

Karolina Karlic (KK):

Summer is my season for returning.

During the tutorial yr I’m instructing, mentoring college students, writing, organizing initiatives, and consistently transferring between conversations. Summer permits me to decelerate and return to the sector, sharpen pencils in my studio, and reset. I spend extra time strolling than driving, extra time listening than photographing.

Lunch Break Room for Plantation Managers, Michelin Rubber Plantation, Bahia, Brazil. Archival pigment print, 42 × 52 ½ in. © Karolina Karlic.

Right now I’m persevering with work on Rubberlands, a mission I’ve been dwelling with for over a decade, whereas starting a brand new chapter of Unseen California with a brand new cohort of artists. I’m collaborating with colleagues throughout the UC system for a multi-year initiative referred to as the UC Climate Action Arts Network which is filling nearly all of my time and producing new relationships within the arts. More than ever, I’m excited about creating the situations for significant encounters — between artists and scientists, between individuals and place, and between alternative ways of figuring out.

I’ve realized that the {photograph} isn’t the start of the work. It normally arrives after I’ve constructed a relationship with a spot.

 

“The {photograph} isn’t the vacation spot.

It’s what stays after a relationship has been constructed.”

– Karolina Karlic

 

YM:
With Unseen California (https://www.unseencalifornia.com/), an interdisciplinary artwork analysis initiative you co-founded in 2021, you direct consideration to California’s ecological points by immersing your self, resident artists, and college students within the UC Natural Reserve System and its many websites. What has this site-specific method revealed?

KK:
The largest shock has been realizing how little I knew.

Reimagined Meadow Post-Debris Flow,Big Creek, Pre-/Post-Dolan Fire, Big Sur, California.
Reproduction of hand-inked photogravure print put in with numerous risograph film-still prints on cotton paper, Probably Gallery, Los Angeles.
© Karolina Karlic. Installation {photograph} © Heather Rasmussen.

 

When Joseph Gallegos and I based Unseen California, we did so as a result of I not believed that one artist — or a method of seeing — may adequately signify California. Every panorama holds a number of histories, so it deserves a number of views.

One of my college students as soon as arrived at a reserve, I imagine we have been on the Granite Mountains Desert Research Center within the Mojave, and requested, “What are we supposed to do here?” I believe that query turned the mission.

We’re not there as a result of we have already got solutions. We’re there to spend sufficient time with a spot that it begins to vary us. We consider our work as discipline notes — fragments towards figuring out. The discipline is as a lot a psychological area as a bodily one, and each web site go to jogs my memory that marvel begins after we admit we don’t but know what we’re taking a look at.

Unseen California’s web site splash web page, August 2026.

YM:
Language Has No Weather (theretherenow, 2024) is Unseen California’s first opus. In the introduction you wrote, the highway occupies a central place, appearing each as a mode of transport and a filter that makes crucial points go by the wayside. On a private degree, inform us about your first sights and encounters with California’s shifting ecologies.

Cover of Language Has No Weather, Unseen California inaugural artist cohort’s photobook, printed (riso) and printed by theretherenow (2024).

Spread in Language Has No Weather with Karolina Karlic’s work in Language Has No Weather (theretherenow, 2024).

KK:
I realized California by its roads, however I got here to know it by leaving them.

When I first moved to Santa Cruz, I spent hours driving Highway 101 and Highway 1. From the automotive, California unfolds as one spectacular view after one other — coastlines, agriculture, forests, oil platforms, mountains. It’s straightforward to imagine you’ve seen the panorama merely since you’ve handed by it.

Everything modified as soon as I began returning to the identical locations. I started noticing what couldn’t be seen at freeway pace: erosion after winter storms, animal tracks after a hearth, fog slowly rolling throughout a hillside nurturing redwood bushes, the quiet return of latest progress.

The panorama stopped being surroundings and have become a trainer.

I noticed that seeing isn’t about protecting extra floor. It’s about returning usually sufficient that a spot begins to disclose itself by itself phrases.

YM:
In 2014, you began engaged on Rubberlands, wherein you map the commodification of the Hevea tree and the environmental and social penalties of the worldwide rubber business. The sequence combines archival materials with images made throughout fieldwork in Brazil. What position has the archive performed on this mission?

KK:
The archive taught me that images have lengthy lives.

When I first started working with the Ford, Firestone, Goodyear, U.S. Rubber Company, and B.F. Goodrich archives, I wasn’t searching for historic illustrations. I wished to know how images helped form concepts about business, the way it linked info from one place to a different, and the way it documented a pivotal second in globalization. Once I started working in Brazil with households, scientists, and communities who proceed to stay with the results of these histories, these pictures took on totally new meanings.

Emilly Farias within the Michelin Rubber Groves, Michelin Rubber Plantation, Bahia, Brazil. Archival pigment print, 42 × 52 ½ in. © Karolina Karlic.

Sisters Ivna and Ingrid Souza Playing with Cousin Monick Farias within the Family Backyard with Squash Plants within the Foreground at Company Housing Complex Vila 4,
Michelin Rubber Plantation, Bahia, Brazil. Archival pigment print, 32 × 40 in. © Karolina Karlic.

 

The archive stopped feeling just like the previous. It turned one other panorama to stroll by — one I may confront within the current and activate as half of a bigger historic document.

Across all of my work, I’m within the types human exercise takes and their outcomes — whether or not that’s the auto business in Detroit, rubber plantations in Brazil, or post-fire landscapes in California. Photography permits me to hint these relationships throughout time, geography, and reminiscence.

 

“Over time, I got here to appreciate that images wasn’t

merely documenting globalization—it was serving to to construct it.”

– Karolina Karlic

 

YM:
How can Lenscratch readers comply with the evolution of Rubberlands?

KK:
Rubberlands has by no means felt like a mission with an ending. Every return to the sector, each go to to an archive, each dialog opens one other query.

Hevea brasiliensis (Rubber Tree Graft in Plastic Bag No. 1 & No. 2), Michelin Rubber Plantation, Bahia, Brazil.
Diptych, archival pigment prints, 32 × 40 in. every. © Karolina Karlic.

Readers can comply with the work by exhibitions and public talks, however after dwelling with this mission for greater than a decade, I’ve realized that I owe it to the slower tempo and intimacy of a ebook. Some initiatives ask for a gallery wall; Rubberlands asks for a publication — one that may maintain its many histories, contradictions, and unanswered questions.

I’ve stopped considering of initiatives as issues to complete. I consider them as conversations I proceed to have with the world. I hope the ebook turns into one other place to return to — an area the place readers can linger, make connections, and maybe start asking questions of their very own.drive

YM:
You are a contributing creator and college designer of the Environmental Art + Social Practice MFA program at UC Santa Cruz. Can you spotlight a couple of latest pupil initiatives?

KK:
One of the good privileges of my profession has been serving to to form the Environmental Art + Social Practice MFA at UC Santa Cruz alongside a unprecedented group of colleagues. I lately accomplished my time period as this system’s Director of Graduate Studies, and one of the crucial rewarding elements of that have has been working carefully with artists as they develop practices rooted in relationships — with individuals, with place, and with the more-than-human world.

Geese Fly Over the Former Iron Gate Dam on the Klamath River, September 2024. © Jonas Banta.

Handprints on the Weitchpec Gas Station, December 2023. © Jonas Banta.

One latest graduate, Jonas Banta (MFA 2025), asks what Indigenous images can grow to be past correcting historic misrepresentation. His work follows salmon, rivers, and Indigenous data throughout Alaska and California, proposing images as a apply of kinship, duty, and cultural continuity.

We Gather the Rubble (Mounir), 2026. Rubble, printing gel on black paper.
Engineer Mounir Mabsout, Dima’s father, holds stays from bombed buildings in Beirut, throughout analysis on how one can rebuild houses with the rubble. © Dima Mabsout.

Another graduate pupil, Dima Mabsout (MFA 2026), transforms rubble from bombed buildings in Lebanon into handmade pigments and layered images, tracing relationships between geology, language, reminiscence, and rebuilding. It’s a unprecedented instance of how materials apply can maintain grief whereas imagining restore.

The Greenhouse Project by L Gilbert and Dav Bell. See: 

I’m additionally extremely grateful for The Greenhouse Project, initiated by EASP graduates L. Gilbert (MFA 2023) and Dav Bell (MFA 2023). What started as artists constructing an open-air gathering area on the UCSC Farm has grown right into a dwelling seed library, seed storytelling circles, neighborhood meals, and collaborations with Indigenous seed keepers, farmers, artists, and researchers. It jogs my memory that among the most significant artistic endeavors proceed rising by the communities that take care of them.

Students in UCSC Art Department’s Immersive Arts Field Research course, co-taught by Professors Karolina Karlic and Jonathan Jackson,
on the Sweeney Granite Mountains Desert Research Center, Mojave Desert, California, 2025. Photo © Karolina Karlic.

 

Teaching has made me a greater artist as a result of it retains me studying. I usually inform my college students that I’m ten p.c trainer and ninety p.c pupil, and yearly they develop my understanding of what artwork will be and who it may possibly serve.

YM:
What does photographing in a warming world imply to you?

KK:
Photographing in a warming world has made me extra snug with uncertainty.

Climate change doesn’t match inside a single {photograph}. It unfolds throughout generations, seasons, migrations, extinctions, and sluggish transformations that usually escape our consideration.

Photography can’t remedy that.

But it may possibly train us to decelerate.

It reminds us that we’re not standing outdoors the panorama wanting in — we’re already a part of it. The older I get, the much less I believe images begins with making pictures.

I believe it begins with constructing relationships with individuals, with locations, with historical past, and with the more-than-human world.

The {photograph} is just the hint these relationships go away behind, a document of time shared with a spot.

 

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Artist bio of Karolina Karlic: Through a spread of photographic media Karlic creates work that the intersection of images and documentary practices, with a give attention to techniques of labor and business, globalization, and their impression on the social and environmental landscapes. Karlic has been the recipient of quite a few fellowships, residencies, and awards, together with the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Cultural Exchange International Fellowship of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Fellowship, the Hellman Fellowship, the Sacatar Foundation Residency Program, and Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program, amongst others. Karlic’s images has been printed within the New York Times, The New Yorker, Aperture, Artforum, Juxtapoz Magazine, Society of Photographic Education, IMA Japanese Magazine, Marie Claire UK, and others.

Her analysis is devoted to telling the tales of these individuals and environs affected by the post-modernization of the economic world. Through the usage of documentary artwork apply as a analysis methodology somewhat than a creative model, her work seeks to raised perceive societal, environmental, and industrial constructs by critically making visible notes of them. Karlic’s work invitations viewers into an area the place historic consciousness is crucial to reflecting on our relationship to consumption by questioning images’s limitations, participating up to date considerations across the social impression of artwork, and elaborating on the distinctions between artwork and lived expertise.

In her analysis, Rubberlands, a photographic survey that maps the methods pure rubber manufacturing is socially, ecologically and systemically fashioned, Karlic proposes that rubber + images are each integral parts of the second part of the economic revolution. This analysis proposes that every are equal gamers within the improvement of a globalized up to date cell society of creating and consuming.

Karolina Karlic is the founding director of, Unseen California, a analysis initiative that serves as a centralizing hub for arts+science+humanities analysis that goals to construct upon and lengthen educational led arts analysis, training and pupil work in out of doors California classroom laboratories throughout the UC Natural Reserve System by an interdisciplinary arts method to visualizing the environmental and social considerations of the California Landscape within the twenty first Century. Unseen California is a site-specific analysis initiative for field-based arts analysis, instructing and studying, public programming, and the creation of artworks that deal with California’s cultural histories and ecological landscapes.

Academic roles of Karolina Karlic: University of California, Santa Cruz, Associate Professor Karolina Karlic is the inaugural Art + Science Director of the Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History.

In 2020 Karlic cofounded Unseen California, a multi-pronged arts analysis initiative using the University of California Natural Reserve System (UC Nature) seeded by “PlaceMakers: UC Place-based Art + Design” MPRI planning grant.

Karlic is a contributing creator and principal college of the UCSC Environmental Art + Social Practice MFA program that launched in 2021 and the UCSC Arts Division’s Creative Technologies on-line BA program the primary of its type at any UC campus launched in fall 2024.

Artist web site: www.karolinakarlic.com/

Unseen California: www.unseencalifornia.com/

Instagram: @karolinakarlic

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Artist bio of Yogan Muller: Yogan Muller is a French photographer, first-generation graduate, researcher, and educator. His work engages with ecological overshoot and its impression on landscapes, assets, and communities. Research, crucial approaches to panorama, fieldwork, and design are central to his course of. He works with images, photogrammetry, drones, and the ebook type.

After the traumatic lack of his father in February 2022, belonging, identification, and fractured roots are themes that got here to the fore. He sublimates his loss in JPM, an ongoing, manifold mission which culminated in a ebook dummy he conceived, designed, and produced inside Penumbra Foundation’s Long-Term Program (Photobooks) in 2024 and 2025. His JPM dummy has been shortlisted and exhibited on the LUMA Foundation in the course of the 2025 Rencontres d’Arles, the 2026 Dummy Award (Photobook Museum, Cologne, Germany), and the 2026 Athens Photo Festival in Greece.

In October 2019, Yogan moved to Los Angeles to hitch the UCLA Design Media Arts (DMA) Counterforce Lab. He taught images, photogrammetry, AI, and drones at UCLA DMA between 2020 and 2024. In November 2018, he graduated with certainly one of the primary practice-based PhDs in Photography from ENSAV La Cambre and Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.

His work is within the collections of Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), the Getty Museum (Los Angeles), and personal collections.

Artist web site: www.yogan-muller.com

Instagram: @yoganmuller