“Humanise Something Free of Error” is Sarah Piegay Espenon’s first book, published by Loose Joints in May 2018. Across 176 pages, with 69 colour and 35 duotone plates, it approaches weather modification not as spectacle but as a documentary problem: the long human effort to intervene in natural weather patterns, first through hopeful gestures toward food production and water supply, later folded into military and capitalist technologies with consequences for agriculture, ecosystems, and commodity markets.
The method is accumulation rather than argument. Espenon draws on press libraries, online forums, and her own photographic archives, assembling an oblique visual record compiled over three years. The sequencing keeps its subject open, moving along the uncertain line between peaceful and hostile uses of geoengineering. What results is deliberately unresolved: images that raise the ethics of treating natural forces as a form of power, and that cannot fully illuminate the covert operations they imply.
The book’s material form is unusually considered for its scale. At roughly 137 by 195 mm and bound as an open-spine softcover, it treats sequence and handling as parts of its meaning rather than as neutral packaging — a structure suited to a project about systems we partly see and partly do not.
For collectors, this is an early, clearly defined work by an artist and designer who co-founded Loose Joints, and an example of how a small press can turn archival research into a sustained critical object. Its subject — the hidden trajectories of climate intervention — has only become more pressing since 2018.
