Renee Royale's Landscapes of Matter

Abstract In 2021, New Orleans–based artist Renee Royale sojourned to Venice, Louisiana—the terminus of walkable land (referred to locally as “the End of the World”) where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico. Surrounded by marshes, human-made canals, and sprawling petrochemical campuses, Royale documented defunct buildings, polluted coasts, and barren trees with a Polaroid camera while collecting water, soil, and flora from each photographed site. The Polaroids were later submerged in jars containing this ecological debris, causing the images to peel, bubble, discolor, and decay. For the artist, the transformed exposures both witness and communicate the stories told by this landscape—indeed, she sees the environment as their cocreator. This article analyzes Renee Royale's work through the lens of ecocriticism and diaspora aesthetics and argues for its symbolic potential to express intersectional histories of violence and climate emergency in the Gulf of Mexico and circum-Caribbean. Reading her photographs as reflective of the Plantationocene condition, the article also considers questions of Black futurity and aftermath, affiliating Royale's practice with Afrofuturist propositions that seek alternate modes of survival beyond racial capitalism.