For a long time the reactions of Earth to our human actions remained unnoticed, and have now finally – not least due to recent international climate protests – moved into public consciousness. The exhibition project Critical Zones invites visitors to engage with the critical situation of the Earth in a novel and diverse way and to explore new modes of coexistence between all forms of life.
Anuradha Mathur (1960–2022) and Dilip da Cunha (b. 1958) are founders of the design platform Ocean of Wetness which is directed towards imaging and imagining habitation in ubiquitous wetness rather than on a land-water surface. The shift from surface to wetness has profound implications for design in the face of climate change. Their objective is to resituate not just the future but also our understanding of the past and experience of the present. Art is central to the platform. Mathur and da Cunha have won several awards in their careers. They are the authors of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001); Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (2006); Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009), and coeditors of Design in the Terrain of Water (2014). These books accompanied major public exhibitions that form an intrinsic part of Mathur and da Cunha’s design practice.
Peter Weibel (*1944) is the Chairman and CEO of ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, director of the Peter Weibel Research Institute for Digital Cultures and professor emeritus of media theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
He is considered a central figure in European media art on account of his various activities as an artist, theoretician, and curator. He publishes widely in the intersecting fields of art and science.
His career took him from studying literature, medicine, logic, philosophy, and film in Paris and Vienna and working as an artist to head of the digital arts laboratory at the Media Department of New York University in Buffalo (1984 to 1989) and founding director of the Institute of New Media at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main (1989–1994). As artistic director he was in charge of Ars Electronica in Linz (1986–1995), Seville Biennial (BIACS3, 2008), and of Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011). He commissioned the Austrian pavilions at Venice Biennale (1993–1999) and was chief curator of the Neue Galerie Graz (1993 to 1998).
Peter Weibel was granted honorary doctorates by the University of Art and Design Helsinki, in 2007 and by the University Pécs, Hungary, in 2013. In 2008, he was awarded with the French distinction “Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.” The following year he was appointed as full member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts Munich, and he was awarded the Europäischer Kultur-Projektpreis [European Cultural Project Award] of the European Foundation for Culture. In 2010, he was decorated with the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, First Class. In 2013 he was appointed an Active Member of the European Academy of Science and Arts in Salzburg. In 2014, he received the Oskar-Kokoschka-Preis [Oskar-Kokoschka-Prize], in 2017 the Österreichische Kunstpreis - Medienkunst [Austrian Art Prize - Media Art] and in 2020 the Lovis-Corinth-Prize and the TREBBIA-Prize. In 2015 Peter Weibel was appointed as Honorary Member of the Russian Academy of Arts in Moscow.
Bruno Latour (1947 – 2022) was a professor at Sciences Po Paris and director of the TARDE program. In addition to work in philosophy, history, sociology, and anthropology of science, he has collaborated on many studies in science policy and research management.
From 1982 to 2006 he was a professor at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (CSI) at the École Nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and, for various periods, visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. Before "Critical Zones. Horizons of a New Earth Politics" in 2020, Bruno Latour curated three major international exhibitions at ZKM|Karlsruhe: "Iconoclash beyond the image wars in science, religion and art" in 2002, "Making Things Public. The atmospheres of democracy" in 2005 and "Reset Modernity!" in 2016. The three exhibition catalogues are with MIT Press.
While being at Sciences Po, he created the médialab to seize the chance offered to social theory by the spread of digital methods as well as, together with Valrie Pihet, a new experimental program in art and politics (SPEAP) now directed by Frédérique Ait-Touati.
In 2008 Bruno Latour received the Siegfried Unseld Prize, in 2010 the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize, in 2013 the International Holberg Memorial Prize, and in 2021 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize.
Critical Zones. Observatories for Earthly Politics, was conceived and exhibited at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (2020–2022) based on a concept by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. For the Goethe-Institut South Asia, a travelling adaption of Critical Zones titledCritical Zones. In Search of a Common Ground is co-produced by the ZKM | Karlsruhe, and the Goethe-Institut/ Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai. It shows a selection of artistic positions and is complemented by further works from Indian and Sri Lankan artists. Mira Hirtz and Daria Mille are the curators of the exhibition at Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai.
For a long time the reactions of Earth to our human actions remained unnoticed, and have now finally – not least due to recent international climate protests – moved into public consciousness. The exhibition project Critical Zones invites visitors to engage with the critical situation of the Earth in a novel and diverse way and to explore new modes of coexistence between all forms of life.
In order to remedy the generally prevailing disorientation and dissension in society, politics, and ecology with regard to the changing state of the planet, the exhibition project sets up an imaginary cartography, considering the Earth as a network of Critical Zones. The term Critical Zone is taken from the geosciences and describes the fragile layer of the Earth, its surface, which is only a few kilometres thin and on which life is created. In addition to emphasizing the vulnerability of this thin layer, the term also sheds light on the numerous controversies that have triggered new political attitudes towards it. Created by a wide variety of life forms over time, living organisms interact in these Critical Zones, but also earth, rock, water, and air. Those life forms had completely transformed the original geology of the Earth, before humanity transformed it yet again over the last centuries.
Over the years, scientists have dedicated their research to the Critical Zone. They have made us aware of the complex composition and extreme fragility of this thin layer of the Earth, in which all life forms, humans included, have to cohabit. Critical Zones explores the urgency of bringing together skills, knowledge, disciplines, and cultures to jointly create a cartography of the multitude of Earths and compose common ground. The exhibition simulates on a small scale the model of a new spatiality of the Earth and the diversity of relations between the life forms inhabiting it. The exhibition creates a landscape that makes the public understand the characteristics of the so-called New Climatic Regime, a term coined by Bruno Latour to describe the global situation affecting all living things. Not being limited to ecological crises, the term also includes questions of politics and cultural history as well as ethical and epistemological changes of perspective. In attempt to compose common ground between different disciplines, humans and non-humans, the exhibition aims to steer a debate towards new Earthly Politics.
This special combination of thought experiment and exhibition was developed by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour in their previous collaborations at ZKM. Their intensive working relationship has spans now more than twenty years. Critical Zones is characterized by an extensive collaboration of artists, designers, scientists, and activists. Art, with all its imaginative, speculative and aesthetic power, takes up the important challenge of developing new forms of representation and options for action in an overall situation that has not yet been clarified.
