Winners
© Renato Cruz Santos

Laura Huertas Millán

In her prizewinning film projection, Laura Huertas Millán investigates the cultural, medicinal, and ritual uses of coca long before cocaine was first produced in Europe in the nineteenth century. Starting with the plant’s prohibition during the Spanish colonization of Latin America, Millán develops a speculative narrative that focuses on a group of métisse women who secretly distributed coca leaves in the seventeenth century. In reaction to the lack of archival material, the artist uses fiction as a strategy, visualizing in a fragmentary narrative the colonial appropriation of nature and the role of resistance in this process.

More

Para la Coca, 2024 © Laura Huertas Millán

Sarker Protick

Sarker Protick examines the extensive changes imposed by humans on the Indian subcontinent in his prizewinning project. Focusing on the historical region of Bengal, which today includes India and Bangladesh, he transfers the examination of the colonial history of the British Empire to a photographic study of the present. He is interested in the expansion of the railroad and the development of coal mining in the nineteenth century. Traveling through Bangladesh and India, he created a body of photographs that addresses the global, geopolitical, and historical dimensions of imperialism as the source of the Anthropocene and its impact on the climate crisis in a visual language that is precise and atmospheric.

More

© Tanjimul Tuhin
From the series Iron Path, 2023–ongoing © Sarker Protick
Jury
© C/O Berlin Foundation, David von Becker
The Jury

The jury consisted of Lewis Chaplin (Co-founder, Loose Joints Publishing), Martin Guinard (Curator, LUMA Arles), Hajra Haider Karrar (Curator, SAVVY Contemporary), Iris Sikking (Curator, Fotomuseum Den Haag, The Hague), Olga Smith (Newcastle University), Christiane Riedel (Chair, Crespo Foundation), Sophia Greiff (Co-Head of Program, C/O Berlin Foundation), and Katharina Täschner (Junior Curator, C/O Berlin Foundation). Based on the nominations by fifteen international experts, the jury’s decision was unanimous.

About the Prize
A New View of Nature

Many ideas about nature have become unsettled as people realize that life and economics under global capitalism have irrevocably changed the global ecosystem. The effects of the climate crisis show that nature in the twenty-first century is no longer “natural,” but is instead affected in every way by human actions. How do we view nature today, when its condition is indivisibly interwoven in the social and political expressions of our way of life?

Together with Crespo Foundation, C/O Berlin awards the After Nature . Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize from 2024. Named after the founder and photographer Ulrike Crespo (1950–2019), the prize honors international artists using photography and lens-based media to respond to the changing ecologies of today.

A joint project with