“Cradling the images in their DEV–STOP–FIX baths with many repetitive, soothing motions, I struggle to comprehend why a clerk nomenclaturist at the Russian Ministry of Defence would name a death machine, a military drone designed to kill and destroy, after something so alive—is it cynicism? Dark humour? A monstrous tongue–in–cheek? Mockery? Age–old juxtaposition of the beautiful and the sinister? Obliging with the perverse orders from the bosses? Indulging in twisted desires of one’s own? A wish to decorate death with flowers? A floral trifle. 

    The answer doesn’t really matter. What matters is the way it flies, the way it lands, the way it kills, the way it shatters lives, the way Ukrainian Air Defence Forces are or aren’t able to detect it piercing the sky and shoot it down (its falling debris still potentially lethal), before it delivers the harm it intends. The difference between the two geraniums is so banal that it would’ve been embarrassing to point out, if the situation wasn’t calling for it.”

         — “Geranium is falling and landing elsewhere: photographing and narrating landscapes and militarization across Scotland and Ukraine”, Environmental Humanities, forthcoming