WE APPEAR TO LIVE IN A CATASTROPHIC AGE…
Our lives are caught between climate change, pandemics, wars, market crashes, biodiversity collapses, and supply chain disruptions. The new normal, it seems, is one where apocalyptic narratives predominate and where precarity is to be expected or even embraced. Many efforts to head off catastrophe, meanwhile, often seem inadequate to the task, embracing status quo politics or hanging their hopes on salvation through technological disruption. What, then, would an anti-catastrophic project that takes our myriad crises seriously but does not fall into the trap of catastrophic thinking look like?
The aim of this project is to interrogate the concept of catastrophe – how it is defined, analyzed, and deployed – and anti-catastrophic practices in an attempt to envision alternatives to our present.
It does so through an edited volume, art and design commissions, and offline and online exhibitions that explore catastrophe and anti-catastrophe in practice around the globe. The focus throughout is on how novel thinking and practice in design, architecture, and technology can open possibilities for more equitably, democratically, and sustainably surviving a catastrophic world, but also expanding epistemic horizons beyond such apocalyptic thinking. The collaborators on the project include international scholars, artists, and journalists , and the project is committed to open collaboration and new partners and participants.
This project comprises of three elements:
Dispatches:
A forum to present short, experimental text and multi-media works engaging contemporary crises and catastrophes. While started in response to the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine, Dispatches are not journalistic accounts of the present. Rather, they situate crises, shocks, and violence within a broader examination of infrastructure, art, energy, economy, geo-politics, and extractionism, thereby broadening our understanding of these issues and complementing both journalistic and scholarly accounts. At this moment when deliberate strategies of shock and war are legitimating calls for reactionary nationalisms, increased extraction of natural resources, and the reallocation of capital in ever more iniquitous ways, we believe that it is critical to refuse the reactionary logics of the moment by thinking in planetary terms that reimagine our relations to energy, design, geo-politics, logistics, and finance.
Places:
We are curating a series of commissions that use place-based design and artistic practices to engage with histories of colonialism, extraction, technology, and politics. Our goal is to develop situated practices that explore how histories of infrastructures inform the future and engage multiple publics in different locations on the themes of the project while fostering new methods and aesthetics.
Narratives:
We are engaged in a long- term book project and affiliated exhibition that solicits work from scholars, journalists, writers, designers, and artists on the themes of contemporary catastrophism and how to manage and build for non-catastrophic futures. The works are global in distribution and engage the topic at different scales, from the molecular to the planetary.