For hundreds of years following the instigation of slavery, the relationship of Black people to land in the West was defined through labor. They were depicted as human animals made to work on plantations and considered little more developed in their thinking and behaviour than beasts in the field. Enlightenment thinkers in the 18th century, like the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, theorized that humans were shaped by their environments. Temperate northern climates made Homo Europaeus into a “light, wise, inventor.” As a creature born of tropical conditions, he wrote that Homo Africanus had a “flat nose; swollen lips” and was “sly, sluggish, neglectful.” Linnaeus’ arguments laid the groundwork for future generations of “scientific” racists whose pernicious ideas about racial intelligence and hierarchy remain with us today.

Ụzọchukwu does not so much address these histories as suggest other possibilities for living. “There’s nothing new under the sun,” observed the Afrofuturist author Octavia E. Butler, “but there are new suns.” In his works, Ụzọchukwu transports us from the everyday into the speculative. Into realms of new possibility that rewrite the relationship between Blackness and nature. Here are Black bodies in the dark Earth. Black bodies in the water and in the air. Black bodies crouching in the soil or flying in the sky.

Sometimes the sights he conjures are rhapsodic, such as the naked, glowing man floating through a rose-pink sky in “Celestial Body, 2020.” Other works carry intimations of apocalypse. Like the couple in “Honey, 2022,” who is caught in a moment of tender closeness, their heads bent together as they lean into a kiss against a backdrop of catastrophe. The Earth is black and the sky is clouded, and what looks like a shaft of molten lava is spouting from the ground. Perhaps this is an image of the end of the world. Thoughts of the climate crisis and its disproportionate impact on nations and people of the Global South come to mind. But this might equally be a moment of rebirth. A creation myth in the making, just as “Tectonic Shift, 2019,” offers the Edenic spectacle of two lovers embracing against a verdant backdrop, like the first couple at the dawn of a new world.

To be Black in Ụzọchukwu’s pictures is to be connected to nature at a profound level of engagement and exchange. It is to be heir to a living planet. For millennia, peoples of colour around the world have conceived of the Earth in their myths and dreams and prayers as a lattice of species and systems. They have given it many names as the scholar Donna Harway lists: “Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa (burst from water-full Papa), Terra, Haniyasu-hime, Spider Woman, Pachamama, Oya, Gorgo, Raven, A’akuluujjusi, and many many more.” In Ụzọchukwu’s photographs we glimpse yet further modes of living in the world and living with the world. Other scenes of Black being. Other endings and new beginnings.