Amidst a climate of uncertainty and social distancing due to COVID-19, writer and e-flux journal contributing editor Elvia Wilk and artist Anicka Yi discuss various changing global ecologies, viral and otherwise. Their original in-person conversation was planned on the occasion of Tate Modern’s selection of Yi for the annual Hyundai / Turbine Hall commission. A symbiotic organism in its own right, Anicka Yi’s work fuses multi-sensory experience with synthetic and evolutionary biology to form lush bio-fictional landscapes. Utilizing a “biopolitics of the senses,” Yi challenges traditional approaches to the human sensorium, emphasizing olfaction as well as microbial and embodied intelligence. Through her research ...

In the face of climate chaos, post-truth politics, and growing tribalisms, it’s clear that liberalism’s old structures are unraveling. Drawing on resilience ecology, Stephanie Wakefield suggests we understand such phenomena to be indicators that we are entering the Anthropocene’s back loop, a time of release and collapse, confusion and reorientation, in which not only populations and climates are being upended but also physical and metaphysical grounds. Anthropocene Back Loop takes us on a journey though different responses and manifestations of the back loop, exploring urban resilience infrastructures, post-apocalyptic imaginaries in fiction and critical theory, and a range of everyday practices ...

These past few years, the fairly ancient concept we call “truth” has been bandied about the place quite a bit. Our social trust barometers, for a long time calibrated with “politician” on one side and “scientist” at the other, have been thrust into stormy weather. People like Donald Trump and Richard Dawkins have buried the needle into extremes of rhetorical squall, political uproar and techno-scientific demand, operationalising belief and fact in excessive ways — destructive of both self and others. The rest of us, muddling through this other ancient concept we call “modern life”, try and poise ourselves somewhere in ...

Archifutures is an edited collection of essays from the Future Architecture Platform, the first pan-European platform of architecture museums, festivals and producers, bringing ideas on the future of cities and architecture closer to the wider public. The platform connects multi-disciplinary emerging talents to high profile institutions like museums, galleries, publishing houses, biennials, and festivals. It provides talented conceptual thinkers and practitioners in architecture with opportunities to speak up – and be seen and heard.

Now is not a time for metaphorical sticking plasters or vanity projects, it is a time for change and a time for action. The mandate of architects and urbanists today goes way beyond designing buildings, it includes changing behavior, influencing and impacting policy, and building bottom-up agency with new understandings of value, justice, and cultural production. This task is best achieved by sharing not just strategies but also practice – completely openly and freely. This sixth volume in the Archifutures series for the Future Architecture platform, therefore, focuses on emerging narratives and strategies that can help architects adapt their practice towards ...

Aridity Lines is an eight-episode podcast series commissioned by TBA21–Academy and co-produced with Radio Ma3azef. Conceived by Reem Shadid and Barbara Casavecchia as part of The Current III: “Mediterraneans: ‘Thus waves come in pairs’ (after Etel Adnan),” the series invokes the local ecological knowledge that delicately treads the porous borders between its land and water bodies around the Mediterranean sea. By scientific definition, an aridity line is the line that connects all points with the same average amount of annual rainfall. We are taking this drifting threshold that traverses times and human-made borders as a magnifying lens to read through ...

Taking as its premise that the proposed epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, this collection explores the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in an era of ecological crisis. Art in the Anthropocene brings together a multitude of disciplinary conversations, drawing together artists, curators, scientists, theorists and activists to address the geological reformation of the human species. Contributors include Amy Balkin, Ursula Biemann, Amanda Boetzkes, Lindsay Bremner, Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr, Heather Davis, Sara Dean, Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse (smudge studio), Irmgard Emmelhainz, Anselm Franke, Peter Galison, Fabien Giraud & Ida Soulard, Laurent Gutierrez ...

After humans destroy one another’s worlds, what will be left are the jellyfish. At least, this is the suggestion of the biologist Jeremy Jackson, who argues that the synergistic effects of the 6th mass extinction have led to the flourishing of some species — such as jellyfish. Such thriving is almost certainly not what Joseph Beuys had in mind when he argued that we are creating the “total artwork of the future social order.” But what would happen if we held these provocations together: that human auto-destruction is a creation for other worlds, other species … other others? Artworks for ...

When first launched the Biosphere 2 was sold by the media to an eager public as crucial scientific research that would save us when the earth became uninhabitable.  This was easier then explaining the complicated fact that many of its central ideas had come from an avant-garde theater troupe. But these performative roots were mirrored by Barbara T. Smiths “21st Century Odyssey.”  When Smith’s boyfriend, Dr. Roy Walford, went into the Biosphere for two years she traveled around the world doing performances and communicating with him through then cutting-edge tech like faxes and video chat. While he and the other ...

We affirm ourselves as the center of evolution by saving it from our own destruction. Our new heroism is to keep things, at best, as bad as they are. What does good even mean? We are the joke of evolution—and nobody’s laughing. Listen to Chus Martínez in conversation with marine scientist Skye Morét and writer Ingo Niermann.

Beverly Buchanan’s Marsh Ruins (1981) are large, solid mounds of cement and shell-based tabby concrete, yet their presence has always been elusive. Hiding in the tall grasses and brackish waters of the Marshes of Glynn, on the southeast coast of Georgia, the Marsh Ruins merge with their surroundings as they enact a curious and delicate tension between destruction and endurance. This volume offers an illustrated examination of Buchanan’s environmental sculpture, which exists in an ongoing state of ruination. Amelia Groom illuminates Buchanan’s vision of sculptural ruination, and probes her remarkable work in terms of ideas of witnessing, documentation, landscape, and cultural ...

In the second episode of Aridity Lines, my guest is Ala Tannir, an architect, researcher, and curator from Beirut, Lebanon. We focus on her work and research concerned with exploring the Mediterranean Sea as a space of resistance and possible interspecies alliances. Where Tannir maps out new currents of movement of jellyfish and humans at risk in the Mediterranean Sea. She connects the undefeated underwater species, which thrive in ailing seas where oxygen levels are low, with the movement (or the denial thereof of vulnerable human beings) above water to help us understand how the crisis of climate change and ...