“Carrying on in denial is going to bring disasters sooner, whereas by facing up to what is happening and could happen can bring us the strength to have honest and open discussion about it.”
Category Archive: Anthropocene
An event in Marseille offered some thoughts on ideas of sustainability, resilience and the effects of the capitalocene on non-human life
The course will explore how artists, designers and activists use biohacking, gaming, robotics, synthetic biology, photography and collaborative experiments to investigate existential threats, devise creative strategies for survival and explore humanity’s strange fascination for apocalyptic scenarios
advertising
“The recreational and tourist industry is constantly producing new sports models and trends which show a kind of detachment from the landscape context. Events that take place in a landscape that is in itself fragile due to its topographical configuration, such as glaciers, are only related to the place through the type of sporting activity practicised there”
Richard Mosse subverts equipment designed for surveillance in order to challenge documentary tropes and force us to look anew at images we’ve seen again and again
While exploring the “de-extinction” movement, artists and designers are also questioning its motives, highlighting its shortcomings and challenging the promise that we can resurrect the animals and plants that we have driven to extinction
social
Inspired by medieval bestiaries and observations of our damaged planet, A Bestiary of the Anthropocene is a compilation of hybrid creatures of our time
In previous centuries, Europeans believed that human interventions could tame heavy storms, dry landscapes and unseasonably dark Summers and modify the climate as they wished
In her keynote, Manuela de Barros explored the limits of Earth resources, the responses to climate change, the sharing of a limited territory with non-human beings, the energy and ecology transition and other environmental issues through the lens of artistic proposals
My notes from a round table with curator and COAL co-founder Loïc Fel, artist Claire Bardainne as well as artist and activist Joanie Lemercier
In her talk, art historian and curator Bénédicte Ramade explored the differences between ecological art, environmental art, green art, ecologist art, Anthropocene art, etc.
Examining the potential benefits and risks of using artificial intelligence to advance global sustainability
The exhibition invites us to challenge the dominant narratives about growth and progress and explore the radical implications of a speculative economic model based on the energy emitted by the Sun
Each life forms explains a key aspect about life on Earth. From the sponge that seems to be a plant but is really an animal to the almost extinct soft-shelled turtle deemed extremely unique and therefore extremely precious, these examples reveal how life itself is arranged across time and space, and how humanity increasingly dominates that vision
Artists regard the “doomsday prepper” movement as the expression of a wider cultural anxiety and a loss of faith in governments capability to take care of their own citizens
A social and political history of industrial pollution, from the toxic wastes of early tanneries to the fossil fuel energy regime of the twentieth century
Italian artist Leone Contini’s collaborations with migrant communities open up discussions about local food resilience in the face of the climate crisis
Part school, part shelter and part folly where people came together to learn how to live in a post-collapse scenario
In the middle of New Jersey exists a strange landscape of wetlands and wildlife migrations, garbage dumps and the ruins of industry, toxic waste sites and a river that tells the story of a civilization’s new frontier
Interview with a photographer, bioartist and biology student whose works make visible the plight of endangered mammals in the Baltic sea, the drop in pollinator populations in the Arctic and other uncomfortable realities
An exhibition in Erlangen (DE) looks at the role that technology can play to ensure or threaten the future of our planet
What worlds are revealed when we listen to alpacas, make photographs with yeast or use biosignals to generate autonomous virtual organisms?
The exhibition draws on a historically informed anthropocentric worldview toward a systemic conception of humanity as part of the evolutionary process
Linke’s exhibition scrutinises seabed mining and other forms of extraction and the effects they might have on marine life and communities
How local and transnational acts of resistance are making use of technologies (such as drones) in order to monitor the impacts of extractive industries and develop micropolitical strategies
Several of the works are set in a microcosm where few human beings venture, a place remote from the rest of the world but which played an important role in human history: the Bikini Atoll
What happens to the design discipline when it has to evolve from a world where designers do wonders with (seemingly) unlimited resources and energy to a world where their creativity can only rely on limited ones?
The artist talks about plastic invasion, excavator choreographies on scrapyards and how to stay sane when the world around you is sinking under piles of garbage
This year, the New Zealand pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale will feature lists of inventions, life forms, phenomena and “things” that made progress possible but that no longer exist
Amanda Boetzkes links the increasing visualization of waste in contemporary art to the rise of the global oil economy and the emergence of ecological thinking
Materialism is an impressive exercise in dismantling consumer culture, in leaving aside functions and in ennobling the resources we extract from the Earth at great human and environmental costs
Heikkilä uses painting to address the necessity to acknowledge the importance of nonhuman life and our symbiotic relationship to it
The artworks change according to temperature, subtly echoing the rise of extreme and unpredictable climate events that have brought about scientific studies of how “climate surprise” impacts human behavior and health but also environmental policymaking
Whether his locations are far-flung (ranging from the Antarctic to the Danakil Desert in Ethiopia) or closer to home, Goiris makes them look uncannily suspended, as if they came from another planet
The book offers critical reflections on some of the most challenging environmental problems of our time, including land take, groundwater pollution, desertification, and biodiversity loss
A series of artworks in a disused biology faculty in Riga make the Anthropocene disturbingly palpable
Hong Kong Soup: 1826, a selection of the debris which escapes recycling or landfill and ends up in the sea and washed up on beaches
National parks, reserves and other forms of sanctuarization of nature are often adopted as a measure to protect territories from the detrimental impact of human activity. This exhibition brought together artists whose work invites us to re-examine our relationship with the natural world
French artistic duo Art Orienté Objet attempted to save one of the earliest forms of life on earth from environmental disaster
“Arriba!” is a cocoa plant shipped from the Ecuador Amazonian rainforest, enclosed inside a temperature-controlled container and displayed on top of an Antarctic glacier