HEYDT’s work confronts the existential dread of solastalgia—the psychic dislocation brought on by environmental devastation, as theorized by Glenn Albrecht. Through an interdisciplinary and photojournalistic lens, she documents the violence of globalization, the echoes of post-colonialism, and the scars of climate change. Her journeys to the mines of Australia, the deforestation of New Zealand, the landfills of the Americas, the margins of India, and the post-colonial residues of the Caribbean bear witness to sites of extraction, exploitation, and ecological collapse. For HEYDT, solastalgia is not merely an emotional condition but a sharp political critique. The ruins of our landscapes—urbanization, melting ice caps, drought—are symptoms of capital’s relentless commodification of life. Her documentary photography reveals the contradictions of progress as both salvation and destruction, where the “new” emerges not as liberation but as the violent repetition of the past, perpetuating the cyclical trauma of ecological and cultural erasure. Saturated with the detritus of consumerism and the residues of colonialism, her imagery exposes the uncanny intimacy between ecological collapse and human alienation. In HEYDT’s vision, solastalgia becomes more than despair; it is a critical and haunting call to confront the debris of modernity and reimagine humanity’s relationship with the planet before it is irreparably lost.
