Review past Bernard Hay

In the blistering heat of August, I establish myself walking down the banking concern of the Rio Teju to the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon. The news that week had been filled with images of ecology destruction: the beach resorts of the Algarve were covered in fire; planes dropped water on charred forests in California; the urban infrastructure of New Delhi melted into pools of tarmac. Images of burnt landscapes from a Cormac McCarthy novel repeated endlessly. And the word on anybody's lips: the Anthropocene.

For the by few days Lisbon had been advised to stay indoors. My dry eyes itched and, like many others, I was tired from lack of sleep. If, as journalist and activist Naomi Klein remarked, climate change faces a advice problem, then the over-heated torso makes us feel what nosotros need to articulate. This is the challenge the Anthropocene poses us. Coined to describe the new geological epoch as one in which humanity has left a lasting impact on the planet, the Anthropocene has been the subject area of numerous exhibitions and projects. But as each year brings a seasonal cycle of media-spectacle followed past forgetting, what new forms of cognition are needed to shift our relation to the planet?

Eco-Visionaries: Art, Architecture and New Media After the Anthropocene is the museum's provocative answer to that question. Curated past Mariana Pestana and MAAT Director Pedro Gadhano, the show brings together an array of different practices that seek to respond to the current geological epoch. If climate scientists continue to argue when the Anthropocene began, this exhibition begins by accepting it equally an urgent planetary and socio-political reality. There are no escape plans to Mars or deferrals to artificially intelligent deities here, but instead a series of propositions that seek to empathise, re-imagine, solve and critique humanity's exploitation of the planet.

The exhibition is organised around 5 clusters including 'Adaptation', 'Co-Being' and 'Extinction' that bridge pragmatic solutions to dystopian warnings. In the starting time gallery, John Gerrard'southward (2017) Western Flag is juxtaposed with Territorial Agency'southward Museum of Oil (2016). The sometime is a curt and meticulously computer-generated epitome of a flag of sprayed oil, wittily subverting the United states'south Stars and Stripes. Just equally this work reveals the hidden ability of the oil industry in creating the hegemony of the Westward, Territorial Bureau'due south project brings together information and artefacts to challenge oil-extraction across the earth. Both works, in differing means, adopt the strategies of visual civilization to re-recollect our human relationship to nature's finite materials, setting up the multi-disciplinary attitude that spans the exhibition.

Speculative and critical design feature throughout in the work of Dunne & Raby, MVRDV, Parsons & Charlesworth and others. Beyond this cluster of works is a shared interest in engaging with scientific and technological enquiry, expanding its possibilities whilst creating spaces for critique. In her work Designing for the Sixth Extinction (2013-2015), Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg proposes that bio-blueprint may be an effective response to mass species extinction. A series of diagrams for fictional organisms show creatures that would collectively adopt the roles of extinct species, for example an Autonomous Seed Dispenser which is genetically designed to spread seeds from local plants. The proposition of the work is that these would collectively adopt the roles of extinct species to create a sustainable eco-system. Ginsberg'due south new organisms are propositions at the limits of the plausible, leading the viewer to ask, in the tradition of speculative design, whether a future in which these designs are needed is desirable.

More than immediately pragmatic approaches to the Anthropocene also feature. Bjarke Ingel's Amager Resources Middle (2013), a mount-like waste material energy plant in Copenhagen, is shown through a serial of images. Next to information technology is a small, almost human sized, bio-gas power generator designed by Portugese architects Skrei. Both, unlike the speculative propositions, are physical design-solutions. The Amager Resources Centre was completed in 2017 and is one of Copenhagen's major steps to condign the first carbon neutral city. However, placed within the context of the show, these also accept on a speculative character, asking united states of america to reflect on the planetary implications of such adaptations.

As Mariana Pestana notes in her catalogue essay, humanity'southward bear upon on the planet began to chop-chop increase at the aforementioned time as 18th century Europe adopted (and elevated) scientific rationality as a system for understanding and exploiting the natural globe. I of the exhibitions merits is the inclusion of a range of projects that seek to decolonize environmental activism and its modes of understanding. Carolina Caycedo'southward (2017) Serpent River Volume, for example, charts the consequences of privatizing and building damns on rivers for the indigenous populations that depend on them. Refusing to adopt 1 'gods-eye' view, this accordion fold-out book brings together photography, myth, cartoon and written text to map-out the effects of river privatization.

Post-colonial critique and rivers as well characteristic in Ursula Biemann and Paula Taveres Wood Law (2014), a film which centers around a series of legal cases in Ecuador that led to the state granting legal rights to forests of the Amazon. Testimony from indigenous leaders and activists involved in the battle reveals the challenge of working against a legal system that does non admit other ethical codes toward the natural earth. Equally one leader mentions, the courts "didn't understand the sacred", and by extension failed to recognize the ethical relations that indigenous peoples held to the forest. Information technology is one of the most powerful works in the exhibition, a reminder that solidarity in the environmental struggle will demand to operate non only amongst different peoples, but likely besides between epistemologies.

Walking through the exhibition, I thought of a story that appeared in the guide-books I'd read about Lisbon. On a Sunday morning time in 1755 the urban center began to shudder, startling its inhabitants as buildings started to collapse. Thousands interrupted their morning time prayer fearing divine retribution, emptying the churches only to exist killed past a tsunami minutes later. The great Lisbon convulsion brought the end of Portugal's colonial supremacy and became synonymous for Enlightenment thinkers with the problem of Evil: how could God, a benevolent and all-powerful being, allow terrible things like this to happen on Earth?

Today, many would have described the globe-quake every bit a natural disaster. Merely as the fine art-historian T.J. Demos has argued in Decolonizing Nature, climate change is always already a socio-political problem, i moreover that has differing consequences depending on geographical location, wealth and the form of life of those affected. Would and then many in Lisbon have died if there had been no buildings, or even if their Sun morning had been spent inland? Forest Law powerfully stages the complex intersection of geography, culture and history past locating the testimonies within the Ecuadorian Amazon itself, positioning the narrative both subjectively and geographically. Eco-Visionaries too achieves an infrequent piece of positioning, not only in the heart of a city marked by environmental change, but ane that places the urgency of ecological activism at the heart of art, pattern and the civic debate.

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