The Protectors
In a photo-essay entitled Hythloday, photographer Norberto Fernández Soriano captures a community of activists who set up camp at a hydraulic fracking site in Lancashire, UK.
Words & Images by Norberto Fernández Soriano
The trial site for hydraulic fracture-fracking for shale gas is located in the countryside between the cities of Preston and Blackpool. A mile down the road from this site, a group of activists - known to the local community as ‘The Protectors’ - set up camp, where they lived and fought to stop this fracking trial.
Hythloday translates to ‘expert of nonsense’ in Greek, a namesake from a character in Thomas Moore’s Utopia. A symbolic gesture to the space between fact and fiction, Hythloday is a visual retelling of the experience and beliefs of this activist community’s fight against fracking. Combining the tangibility of the present, the uncertainty of the future, and various threats and personal convictions, the photo-essay maps a journey through an unknown and strange place, where a quiet tension exists between those portrayed and the land.
Norberto Fernández Soriano (1988, Spain) is a visual storyteller and book-maker. Hythloday will be exhibited at the Martin Parr Foundation in 2020.
Author account for the Good Trouble hive-mind.
