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
Category Archive: Anthropocene
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
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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
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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
An exhibition at the Parco Arte Vivente, Turin’s experimental centre for Living Arts, aims to offer new perspectives and lines of inquiry about the Anthropocene
Contemporary positions in art and architecture seeking answers to current environmental problems that transcend mainstream notions of sustainability
Using defective photographic material and a bit of photoshop, Barker shot the plastic bits of trash to make them look like plankton in water
The interactive installation invites “deep listening” within the body but also offers us an opportunity to reflect on how anthropocentric geological changes might be recorded, experienced and how they can be reproduced for other people in order to help them attune themselves to a future marked by man-made geological changes
Today, in the age of CCTV, drones, medical body scans, and satellite images, photography is increasingly decoupled from human agency and human vision. In Nonhuman Photography, Joanna Zylinska offers a new philosophy of photography, going beyond the human-centric view to consider imaging practices from which the human is absent
A resolutely nonanthropocentric take on the materiality of one of the most controversial mediums in art, this approach relentlessly questions past and present ideas of human separation from the animal kingdom. It situates taxidermy as a powerful interface between humans and animals, rooted in a shared ontological and physical vulnerability
The exhibition gathers contemporary artworks as well as zoological and botanical objects to explore the changes in the tropical regions that Wallace once traveled and to shed light on the ecological issues faced by the fauna and flora of Amazon, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore today
Disappearing Legacies: The World as a Forest, an exhibition currently open at the Zoological Museum in Hamburg, “confronts the destruction of tropical habitats in the context of the Anthropocene and mass extinction”
Pazugoo, a gooey, collectively modifiable uranium glow-stick waving Pazuzu, the Sumero-Asyrrian demon of contagion, epidemic and dust, is proposed as a marker for the presence of nuclear waste products
Looking beyond the modernist vision of a utopian nuclear age, contemporary artists are engaging with the lived experience of radiation through nuclear objects, architectures and landscapes
Drawing on fieldwork, philosophy, literature, history, and a range of other perspectives, each of the chapters in this book tells a unique extinction story that explores what extinction is, what it means, why it matters—and to whom