Fall Upon Thee

In this portrayal of Icarus taken from a 1588 engraving by Hendrik Golthuis and Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem housed at the National Gallery in America, designer and artist Eddie Opara recontextualises the tragedy as “a symbolic effect of the Western world’s insatiable desire to invent without consequence.” The consequence, however, is clear: millions of Black people and people of colour are now disproportionately suffering the effects of the climate crisis after, as Opara says, ‘“centuries of an unbridled onslaught of the Western doctrine, its manifest destinies; through slavery, colonialism, industrialisation, world wars.” They have been fallen upon again and again, with the Western world acting like a cracked mirror, distorted and brimming with fallacies.