Earth(ly) Matters. How Natural Environments Travelled to Exhibitions Spaces (Working Titel)

Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands (Deutsches Museum, Munich, 2014-16), The Planetary Garden: Cultivating Coexistence (Manifesta 12, Palermo, 2018), Down to Earth: Klima Kunst Diskurs: unplugged (Gropius Bau, Berlin, 2020) or Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics (ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2020-21) represent a growing number of large-scale exhibitions that engage in a discourse suggesting that Earth as a global environment can no longer be regarded as something separate from human activity. According to a range of scientists, we have thus entered a new geological epoch of Earth’s natural history. Popularised in 2002 through the publication of a paper in Nature by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, this discourse has been subsumed under the term “Anthropocene”: it has subsequently come to permeate not only the natural and social sciences, but also the humanities and the arts.

Many of these exhibitions state that they originated as a response to the urgency of intensifying climate change and its social ramifications, and the titles often directly address the agency of humans as actors, as captured in the metaphor of “The Earth in Our Hands.” Whereas the rising prominence of the scientific concept of the Anthropocene can be regarded as the discursive backdrop, it is also controversial, and the exhibitions mirror this ongoing critical discourse by drawing on different strands of theoretical and philosophical notions to conceive the natural environment. Whether framed as a “whole earth,” “planetary garden,” or a landscape of “critical zones,” the common tenor of these exhibitions suggests nothing short of a call for a paradigm shift away from the Western dichotomy of culture –nature.

In the research project Earth(ly) Matters. How Natural Environments Travelled to Exhibition Spaces, I examine how these exhibitions function as spaces that conflate aesthetic experience and knowledge production, and how aspects of materiality and mediality intersect to create new formats of mediation. Precisely because contemporary exhibitions combine and juxtapose materials and media across the arts, subsuming diverse performative, installation-based, narrative and/or pictorial artistic practices, as well as popular and scientific media, they thus act as an overarching discursive format. An analysis of these exhibitions, in terms of both materials and methods, will help to understand how exhibitions communicate complex scientific/philosophical debates to a general public. Furthermore, I seek to specify the ways in which such exhibitions themselves become actors within an ongoing discourse around the future of our planet.