All posts tagged air pollution

Cars: Accelerating the Modern World @ the Victoria and Albert Museum

The blight of cars

I hate cars.

Pollution

Cars emit vast amounts of toxic fumes, poisoning passersby and making our cities hellholes of pollution.

Due to the increase in the use of private cars, road traffic pollution is considered a major threat to clean air in the UK and other industrialised countries. Traffic fumes contain harmful chemicals that pollute the atmosphere. Road traffic emissions produce greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. (Road Traffic and pollution)

Destruction

The post-war obsession with cars led councils and developers to rip the historic hearts out of most English cities and towns, creating inhumane, alienating and polluted labyrinths of urban freeways with urine-drenched concrete subways as an afterthought for the humble pedestrian.

Death

Cars kill people, lots of people.

According to the World Health Organisation, more than 1.25 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes, and injuries from road traffic accidents are the leading cause of death among people aged between 15 and 29 years of age. (Road accident casualties in Britain and the world)

Cars killed childhood

Lastly, the number one concern of most parents of small children isn’t paedophiles or internet porn, it’s that their kids might be run over by traffic. (Play England website) That explains why parents don’t let their kids play in the street as they did in the halcyon past, but prefer to keep them safely inside. Which contributes to lack of exercise and growth of obesity among children, as well as adversely affecting children’s mental health. Car culture, in other words, killed childhood.

Personally, I think cars should be banned, period.

Cars: Accelerating the Modern World at the Victoria and Albert Museum

This is a dazzling exhibition celebrating the rise and rise of cars which shows how they are not just machines for getting from A to B but were, right from the start, spurs to all kinds of other industries, helping to create:

countless aspects of industrial and commercial design, from instrument panels to ergonomic chairs
innovations in industrial production, specifically the assembly line techniques pioneered at the Ford car plant in Detroit
entire new areas of engineering relating to roads and then to motorways, the construction of stronger road bridges, flyovers, ring roads etc using the new materials of concrete and tarmac
an explosion of consumer accessories from safety hats and goggles to driving coats and gloves all the way up to modern Satnavs
as well as providing a mainstay for the advertising industry for over a hundred years
and becoming a dominating feature of popular culture in films, novels and much more

The car is, when you stop to consider it, arguably the central product of the twentieth century, the defining artifact of our civilisation (and, in my jaundiced view, a perfect symbol of our society’s relentless drive to excess consumption, ruinous pollution and global destruction.)

They promised us the freedom of the road, instead we got day-long traffic jams on 12-lane highways, toxic air pollution, and over a million dead every year. This photo shows congestion blocking the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway

The car has transformed how we move around, how we design and lay out our cities and towns, it has transformed our psychologies and imaginations. As one of the curators explains:

“The V&A’s mission is to champion the power of design to change the world, and no other design object has impacted the world more than the automobile. This exhibition is about the power of design to effect change, and the unintended consequences that have contributed to our current environmental situation.

Structure of the show

This exhibition is brilliantly laid out. You progress through a labyrinthine serpentine curve of cases displaying over 250 artefacts large and small, and studded by no fewer than 15 actual cars, from one of the first ever built to a ‘popup’ car of the future.

Photo of the Benz patent motor car, model no. 3, 1888. Image courtesy of Daimler

The exhibition is immensely informative, with sections and sub-sections devoted to every aspect of cars, their design, manufacture, the subsidiary industries and crafts they support, the global oil industry, and car cultures around the world, it really is an impressively huge and all-embracing overview.

But the thing that made the impact on me was the films.

I counted no fewer than 35 films running, from little black-and-white documentaries showing on TV-sized monitors, through to clips of Blade Runner and Fifth Element on large screens.

There’s the iconic car chase from Bullitt on a very big screen hanging from the ceiling and then an enormous, long, narrow, gallery-wide screen which was showing three long, slow and beautifully shot films of landscapes which have been impacted by the car – a complicated freeway junction in Japan, oil fields in central California, and the ‘lithium triangle’ in Chile, between Chile, Bolivia and Argentina, where lithium is extracted for battery production a vast expanse of flat desert which is being mined to produce lithium and its landscape converted into a colourful patchwork of slag and beautiful blue purification reservoirs.

At both the start and the end of the show are totally immersive films which are projected on screens from floor to ceiling, the first one a speeded-up film of a car journey through London, projected onto three split screens; the final experience in the show is standing in front of a shiny round little Pop-Up Next car around which stretches a curved screen onto which is projected a montage of car disaster imagery, including car crashes, road rage incidents, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster, Jimmy Carter telling us about the energy crisis, which gets louder and faster and more intense until it collapses into a high speed blur of colour. And looming over us, the viewers, I realised after a while, is an enormous drone hanging from the ceiling and looking down on us like one of H.G. Wells’s conquering Martians.

Cars Exhibition, 19th November 2019

All very trippy and intense and sense-bombarding. If you fancy a quiet exhibition, this is not it, sound from all the films is playing at once and, given the subject matter, they are almost all dynamic and fast-moving.

The exhibition is divided into three parts although the continuous serpentine journey past the display cases and films isn’t divided, as in a ‘normal’ gallery, into ‘rooms’.

1. ‘Going Fast’

The exhibition with records of all the gee-whizz visions of a perfect techno future which the car has been lined with throughout its history, with lots of illustrations from magazines and sci fi stories, clips from movies predicting flying cars such as Blade Runner or The Fifth Element. On a massive projector screen right at the start is playing Key To the Future, a film made by General Motors for their 1956 Motorama car show.

This was just one of a series of Firebird concept cars produced by General Motors. Interestingly, the design was inspired by the new jet fighter planes which had just started flying, and the cars copied the jets’ fluid silhouettes, cockpit seats and gas turbine engines designed to reach 200mph. they weren’t actually sold but were produced as experiments in function and design. And to thrill the public at motor shows with exciting visions of hands-free driving.

One feature of these designs for future cars was that a number of them were Russian, from Soviet-era drawings of an ideal communist future. It’s worth noting that the curators have made an effort to get outside the Anglosphere. Unavoidably most of the footage and technology is from America, with a healthy amount about the British car industry, and then sections about Fiat in Italy and Citroen in France.

But the V&A have gone out of their way to try and internationalise their coverage and they commissioned a series of films about car culture in five other parts of the world including one on South African ‘spinners’ (who compete to be able to spin cars very fast in as small a circle as possible), California low-riders, Emirati dune racers in the Middle East, and Japanese drivers of highly decorated trucks. As well as a section towards the end about the ‘Paykan’, a popular people’s car heavily promoted in Iran in the early 1970s which became a symbol of modernity and affluence.

Installation view of Cars at the Victoria and Albert Museum showing an Iranian Paykan on the left, a desert-crossing Auto-Chenille by Citroën in the centre, and a funky bubble car on the right. Note the massive projection screen at the back displaying a panoramic film of oil fields in central California

The section continues with the first-ever production car, the Benz Patent Motorwagen 3, introduced to the public in 1888, and the futuristic Tatra T77 from the Czech Republic, which was designed in the 1920s by Paul Jaray, the man who developed the aerodynamics of airships.

French advertisement for the Tatra 77 (1934)

There’s a whole section about the founding and development of car races, from the Daytona track in Florida, to Brooklands race track in Surrey, both accompanied, of course, by vintage film footage. They explain how the British Gordon Bennett Cup prompted the French to invent the Grand Prix in 1906. There’s racing against other cars, but also, of course, the successive attempts to break the land speed record which attracted great publicity from the 1920s, through the 30s, 40s and 50s.

Britain First Always – Buy British, UK (1930s) Artwork by R. Granger Barrett

And there’s a feminist section of the show which focuses solely on the great women car drivers who appeared at Brooklands such as Camille du Gast from France and Dorothy Levitt, and Jill Scott Thomas who became an important symbol of the women’s rights movement.

There’s a gruesome life-size sculpture of a man named ‘Graham’, which shows what shape a human being would have to be to withstand a car collision. Graham was commissioned last year by The Transport Accident Commission in Victoria, Australia to demonstrate human vulnerability in traffic accidents, and made by Melbourne artist Patricia Piccinini in collaboration with leading trauma surgeon Christian Kenfield and crash investigation expert Dr David Logan.

Graham: what humans ought to look like to optimise their chances of surviving a car crash

2. ‘Making More’

The second section is devoted to the manufacturing of cars and focuses heavily on the range of innovations in manufacturing pioneered at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit as early as 1913. There are models of the factory, black and white film footage of conveyor belts, unexpected footage of meat processing plants where Ford worked as a young man and which the car plants were to some extent modelled on, photos and sketches of all aspects of the production line along with a list of the very tough rules and regulations Ford imposed on his workers.

Sure, they were paid double what they could earn at other factories (a whopping $5) but the stress of staying in one place performing the same function for 12 hours a day, with no smoking or talking and strictly regulated loo breaks took its tool: many workers developed psychological illnesses, many just quit.

Ford’s factories were designed by the architect Albert Kahn who pioneered an entirely new construction space that allowed for larger, more flexible workspaces, a design which quickly spread around the world, for example at Fiat’s Lingotto factory. There are floorplans, architects’ designs, models and photos of all this twentieth century innovation, plus the animated feature Symphony in F celebrating the complex supply chains Ford had established which was shown at the 1933 ‘Century of Progress’ Chicago World’s Fair.

By contrast one wall is filled with some immense film projections of a modern, almost totally-automated BMW car assembly plant in Munich, and there’s a Unimate Robotoc Arm, one of the first robot implements used on a production line as early as 1961 at the General Motors plant in New Jersey The principles are the same but human input, effort and endurance have been almost completely eliminated.

Murals were commissioned to celebrate the wonderful new productiveness of human labour, including the wonderful Detroit Murals by Mexican mural maker Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals by Linda Bank Downs

Production line methods were quickly adopted to a wide range of goods including everything from furniture to architecture, and the speed and rhythms of factory life spread into pop culture, influencing music, dance, fashion and the propaganda of the new totalitarian states.

Hitler, the show reminds us, was a big admirer of Henry Ford, who was himself a noted anti-Semite, and consulted Ford about mass production techniques to help improve German efficiency, which resulted in the remarkably enduring design of the Volkswagen and Hitler’s pioneering Autobahns, but also led the Germans to the efficient mass manufacture of other consumer goods like the Volsempfänger or People’s Radio.

At the other end of the cultural scale, the exhibition includes the ‘production line’ video made in 1965 for the Detroit girl group Martha and the Vandellas song Nowhere To Run To. The Motown Sound which they typified was, after all, named after Motor Town, the town that Henry Ford built up into the centre of the American car industry.

There were to (at least) reactions against production line culture. An obvious one was the creation of powerful unions formed to represent assembly line workers. Following the landmark sit-down strike from 1936 to 1937 in Flint, Michigan, membership of the Union of Automotive Workers grew from 30,000 to 500,000 in one year! Thirty years later, and the exhibition includes some of the posters produced by a Marxist art collective in Paris to support striking car workers during the 1968 mass strikes in France.

But another reaction was against mass production, and in favour of luxury. The Model T meant cars for the masses, but what about cars for the better off? In the 1920s luxury car manufacturers returned to creating bespoke, hand-crafted models, and this triggered a growing market for high-end car accessories. The exhibition includes examples of chic hats and lighters and motoring gloves, all associating the idea of motoring with glamour and luxury (‘To drive a Peugeot is to be in fashion’).

A custom-made Hispano-Suiza Type H6B car from 1922 provides a close-up look at the luxurious and meticulously crafted world of early automotive design.

Hispano-Suiza Type HB6 ‘Skiff Torpedo’. Hispano-Suiza (chassis) Henri Labourdette (body) 1922. Photo by Michael Furman © The Mullin Automotive Museum

Thus the development of mascots on car bonnets, a small symbol which allowed consumers to quietly flaunt their wealth and taste. Thus between 1920 and 1931 French designer René Lalique produced a series of car bonnet ornaments made of glass, which are on display here.

There’s a section devoted to the development of colours, shades and tones, and to the science of producing lacquers and paint which would be durable enough to protect cars in all weathers. Even mass market manufacturers took note and in 1927 General Motors was the first producer to set up an entire department devoted to styling, the ‘Art and Colour Section’. As far back as 1921, under chairman Alfred Sloan, General Motors implemented a policy known as ‘annual model renewal’. Taking its lead from the fashion industry, the cars would be restyled and relaunched annually, with a new look and new colours (although the engineering and motors mostly stayed the same).

And hence the development of extravagant car shows like ‘Motorama’ launched in 1949 by General Motors, an annual series which came to involve celebrity performers, original songs, choreography, models in clothes straight off catwalks, and promotional films.

The ever-growing commercialisation of cars and life in general sparked a backlash in the 1960s and the exhibition explains how the humble VolksWagen became a cheap and cheerful symbol of people who dropped out, adopted alternative lifestyles, and often decorated their VW with hippy images and symbols.

The exhibition features a striking example of a car customised by Tomas Vazquez, a member of the lowrider culture that emerged in Latino communities in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 60s.

3. ‘Shaping Space’

The final section of the exhibition explores the vast impact of the car on the world’s landscape, nations, and cities. It looks at how the petrol engine beat early electric and steam-powered competitors by promising the ability to travel the world, transforming drivers into individual explorers.

Displays include the first ever Michelin guide published in 1900, a little red book giving tips about where to drive in France – examples of the tremendous artwork Shell commissioned to encourage drivers to get out and explore Britain (the Shell guides), and a look at the special off-road cars called Auto-Chenille by Citroën and created to undertake a publicised treks across Africa and Asia.

This section looks at the vast ramifications and impact of the oil industry around the world, from the early days when it was celebrated as a miracle resource, through the evolution of oil-based products like Tupperware and nylon. There are fascinating maps of oil reserves, films about oil extraction

And then on to the 1970s oil crisis which helped inspire the new environmental movement. There’s footage of a grim-faced president Carter making a TV broadcast to the American people and telling them they have to be more careful how they use their limited resources, ha ha ha, and a poster for the first ever Earth Day, called by new environmental activists for 22 April 1970.

Poster for the first Earth Day, 22 April 1970, designed by Robert Leydenfrost, photography by Don Brewster

So it’ll be Earth Day’s 50th anniversary in a few months. And how well have we looked after the earth in the past 50 years?

Not too well, I think. Most of us have been too busy buying stuff, consuming stuff, competing to have shinier, newer stuff, and top of the list comes a shiny new car. I was amused to read the recent report that all the world’s efforts to get people to use electric cars have been completely eclipsed by the unstoppable rise of gas-guzzling Sports Utilities Vehicles. These throng the streets of Clapham where I live. In twenty minutes I’m going to have to dodge and weave among these huge, poisonous dinosaurs as I cycle to work.

Rise of SUVs ‘makes mockery’ of electric car push

As a tiny symbol of our ongoing addiction to the internal combustion engine, there’s an animated map showing the spread of motorways across Europe from 1920 to 2020, which contains the mind-boggling fact that plans are well advanced for a motorway which will stretch from Hamburg to Shanghai! More cars, more lorries, more coaches and buses and taxis and motorbikes and scooters, burn it up, baby!

The evolution of European motorways 1920 to 2020

This final room has the most diverse range of cars on display, including early cars from the 1950s that attempted to address fuel scarcity such as the Messerschmitt KR200 bubble car, alongside the Ford Nucleon, a nuclear-powered concept car, and the exhibition closes with the immersive film I mentioned above, streaming around the ‘Pop.Up Next autonomous flying car’ co-designed by Italdesign, Airbus and Audi.

Summary

I think this is a really brilliant exhibition, setting out to document a madly ambitious subject – one of the central subjects of the 20th century – with impressive range and seriousness. It covers not only ‘the car’ itself but touches on loads of other fields and aspects of twentieth century history, with a confident touch and fascinating wall labels. The serpentine layout combines with the clever use of mirrors and gaps between the partition walls to make it seem much bigger than it is, as do the umpteen films showing on screens large, extra-large and ginormous.

It’s a feast for the mind and the senses.

And it’s not at all a hymn of praise: the curators are well aware of the baleful effects of car culture: there’s a digital clock recording the number of people who’ve died in traffic accidents so far in the world, and another one (in the 1970s oil crisis section) giving a countdown till the world’s oil resources are utterly exhausted (how do they know? how can anyone know?).

But there’s also another digital counter showing the number of cars manufactured in the world so far this year and it shows no sign of abating or slowing down. Car, lorry, bus, truck, coach, motorbike production continue to increase all around the world and is often [author puts his head in his hands and sighs with despair] taken as the primary indicator of a country’s economy.

We’re going to burn this planet down, aren’t we?

Promo video

Curators

The exhibition is curated by Brendan Cormier and Lizzie Bisley, with Esme Hawes as Assistant Curator.

More V&A reviews

More Victoria and Albert Museum reviews

Eco-Visionaries: confronting a planet in a state of emergency @ the Royal Academy

This is an exhibition of art and architecture on the theme of climate change and environmental destruction. It begins with the usual alarming facts and figures, which any educated person who reads a newspaper or watches the news or listens to the radio, should already know almost off by heart:

the world is facing an ecological catastrophe
the ten warmest years ever recorded have all occurred since 1998
we must reduce CO2 emissions to zero by 2050 (at the very latest) to avoid catastrophic global warming
which is already resulting in melting ice caps, retreating glaciers, rising sea levels and more extreme weather events
humans have accelerated the ‘normal’ background rate of species extinctions 1,000-fold with the result that we are living during the Sixth Great Extinction
the world’s population is predicted to grow by 20% over the next three decades to reach 9.7 billion
yadda yadda yadda

21 works

Rather than editorialise, I will list the exhibitions 21 works, giving links to their websites, where available, for you to follow up and read about yourself.

Texts in single quotations marks are from the wall labels or the artist’s own explanations. My own occasional comments are in italics.

Introduction

The curators introduce the exhibition thus:

‘Eco-Visionaries examines humankind’s impact on the planet and presents innovative approaches that reframe our relationship with nature. Through film, installation, architectural models and photography, the works in this exhibition interrogate how architecture, art and design are reacting to a rapidly changing world, beyond mainstream notions of sustainability.’

In the corridor leading towards the show there’s a simple timeline of dates from the industrial revolution onwards, recording natural disasters, growing awareness of how human activity devastates the natural world, the first theorising about global warming, the setting up of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 (1988!) and so on down to this year.

1. Domestic Catastrophe No.3 by HeHe (2018)

“An aquarium containing a domestic globe, a motor to turn the globe and electronic valve or drip feed which releases a fluoresceine tracing dye onto the sphere. As the sphere turns, the green dye wraps itself around the sphere, enveloping it in what appears to be a thin gas or atmosphere that surrounds the planet Earth. The difference between emissions and atmosphere, the ‘man-influenced’ and the ‘natural’ climate cannot be easily defined.”

This is like a big cubic aquarium with a school-globe of the world-sized model of the world slowly turning within a thick liquid. On the bottom of the aquarium is a thin layer of sand and the slowly turning globe spins this sand into little dust devils and typhoons which is rather entrancing.

2. A Film, ‘Reclaimed’, by Ana Vaz and Tristan Bera (2015)

“The ecologic crisis is a political, economic and social crisis. It is also cinematographic, as cinema coincides historically and in a critical and descriptive way with the development of the Anthropocene.”

The bit of the film I saw included clips from Hollywood movies, including some end-of-the-world film with buildings exploding and, soon after that, a clip from Blade Runner, a pleasingly random selection which could come from any one of thousands of art films, documentaries or even loops of movie clips you see played in nightclubs. As in, it didn’t convey any meaning whatsoever to me.

3. Tilapia by Tue Greenfort

A set of depictions of fish in black and white on paper, done to make them look like fossils. It’s based on human interference in the ecosystem of Lake Victoria which has led to the almost complete extermination of tilaplia fish. They were made by covering dead tilaplia specimens with inks and pressing them against the paper.

“A series of black-and-white prints arranged as a shoal of tilapia fish, one of the most consumed varieties of fish in the world but also one of the most invasive and predatory species.”

Tilapia by Tue Greenfort

4. Serpent River Book by Carolina Caycedo (2017)

“A 72-page accordion fold artist-book, that combines archival images, maps, poems, lyrics, satellite photos, with the artist’s own images and texts on river bio-cultural diversity, in a long and meandering collage. The fluctuating publication can frame many narratives. As a book it can be opened, pleated and read in many directions, and has a performatic potential to it, functioning as a score, or as a workshop tool. Serpent River Book gathers visual and written materials compiled by the artist while working in Colombian, Brazilian, and Mexican communities affected by the industrialization and privatization of river systems.”

5. Madrid in the air: 24 Hours by Nerea Calvillo (2019)

“Madrid in the Air: 24 Hours monitors the skyline of Madrid over a 24-hour period, uncovering the almost invisible veil of pollutants in the air.”

“In the Air is a visualization project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid´s air (gases, particles, pollen, diseases, etc), to see how they perform, react and interact with the rest of the city. The visualization tool is a web-based dynamic model which builds up the space the components generate, where through data crossing behavior patterns emerge. The results of these data feed a physical prototype of what we have called a “diffuse façade”, a massive indicator of the air´s components through a changing cloud, blurring architecture with the atmosphere it has invaded and mediating the activity of the participants it envelops.”

“The project highlights the contamination of air in cities caused by vehicle engines, industry, factories and farming.”

It was a film of a camera fixed in a static position at roof level looking out over Madrid and a strange pink or green gauze-like veil hovering over the city, sometimes thickening or advancing – being a visualisation of the soup of pollution we all live in.

6. The ice melting series by Olafur Eliasson (2002)

A series of 20 black and white photos showing very small pieces of glacial ice (four to 10 inches long) melting into the black stones and rubble of a terminal moraine in Iceland.

The Ice Melting series by Olafur Eliasson (2002)

7. Alaska Chair by Virgil Abloh (2018)

“Originally designed as a wooden chair for IKEA, the Alaska Chair is a paradoxical commentary on the effects of our everyday lives and mass-consumption habits on the global rising sea levels and climate change. This work was inspired by the concept of acqua alta, an Italian term used to describe regular floods in Venice, caused by high tides and warm winds. The chair is partly submerged by the rising flood waters, with a doorstep wedge symbolically representing the short-term, makeshift solutions we have for tackling climate change. Yet by casting the work in bronze, a material intended to last, the work reflects on how environmental catastrophe is a tough, long-term problem that is not easily fixed by simple solutions.”

Alaska Chair by Virgil Abloh (2018)

I liked the ‘Do not touch’ sign. The environment is going up in flames but ‘Don’t you dare touch my lovely work of art with your grubby fingers!’

8. The Breast Milk of the Volcano by Unknown Fields (2017)

“Over half the world’s reserves of lithium, a key ingredient in rechargeable batteries in phones, laptops, electric cars and drone technology, is found in the salt flats of the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. This film poignantly examines how even the cleanest energy utopias can have dramatic consequences in material, resource and economic exploitation. Accompanying the film is a lithium battery designed by the artists. It refers to an Inca origin myth of the Salar de Uyuni in which the salt flats were formed by the breast milk and tears of a mother volcano mourning the loss of her child.”

(If you’re wondering why this sad and plaintive video appears to have the half-stoned voice of Elon Musk presenting Tesla Energy over it, you’re not the only one but it’s the same with all the versions of the video scattered across the internet.)

9. The Substitute by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (2019)

“The Substitute draws upon rare zoological archival footage as well as experimental data from artificial intelligence company DeepMind, will enable visitors to come faceto-face with a life-size digital reproduction of a northern white rhinoceros. The last male of the subspecies died in 2018.”

“On March 20, 2018, headlines announced the death of Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni). We briefly mourned a subspecies lost to human desire for the imagined life-enhancing properties of its horn, comforted that it might be brought back using biotechnology, albeit gestated by a different subspecies. But would humans protect a resurrected rhino, having decimated an entire species? And would this new rhino be real?”

10. P-Plastoceptor: Organ for Sensing Plastic by Pinar Yoldas (2014)

“Polypropylene is the second most common plastic after polyethylene. P-Plasticeptor is a sense organ which can detect polypropylene polymers in the ocean. The organ takes its name from its sensing capabilities for polypropylene and its shape that almost resembles the letter P.”

An Ecosystem of Excess: P-Plastoceptor: Organ For Sensing Plastics by Pinar Yoldas (2019)

There are two works, the P-Plastoceptor, and another fictitious organ, Somaximums presented in vitrines as if in pickled alcohol specimen jars. I think they’ve both been invented, made up with rather arcane satirical intent.

11. Our Prehistoric Fate by Basim Magdy (2011)

“Our Prehistoric Fate, 2011 was commissioned by the 1st Time Machine Biennale of Contemporary Art. D-O ARK Underground in Konjic, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The biennale took place inside a massive nuclear bunker in the mountains 60 km. away from Sarajevo. The bunker was commissioned by Josip Broz Tito as a last refuge for him, his family and top Yugoslavian generals in case of a nuclear attack. It took almost 30 years to finish the project. Tito died a year after its completion without ever setting foot in it. Needless to say, the nuclear attack never happened. Two large Duraclear prints hang on Yugoslavian military lightbox displays with clamps in the war strategy room of the bunker where decisions were meant to be made and maps of the situation on the ground were meant to be evaluated. The first claims ‘The Future Belongs To Us’ in large bold letters, the second is an encyclopedia illustration from the 60s that captures an Ankylosaurus, a prehistoric creature we know very little about, as it approaches a pond to drink.”

Our Prehistoric Fate by Basim Magdy (2011)

12. Designs for an overpopulated planet by Dunne and Raby (2009)

“Based on United Nations predictions that at the current rate of ecological transformations there will not be enough food to feed the planet in 2050, Foragers, from the series Designs for an Overpopulated Planet, are speculative full-scale models proposing how to radically change the human diet and digestive system to ensure survival. These devices would allow humans to extract nutritional value from synthetic biology and develop new digestive systems like those of other mammals, birds, fish and insects which are able to digest and process barely edible resources such as tough roots and plant matter.”

Installation view of Designs for an overpopulated planet by Dunne and Raby (2009) Photograph by the author.

Two surreal ‘eating tubes’ along with a photo of how to use one out in the wild.

13. Pollutive Matter-s (three scenarios) by New Territories (S/he) (1997 to 2002)

14. The Dolphin Embassy by Ant Farm (1974 to 1978)

“The Dolphin Embassy was a research project that never was built and that attempted to study the communication between the human being and the dolphins. It would have been built with asbestos cement and it moved with a solar panel and a motor. Besides the quality of the drawings, the interest of this proposal was in the social relations that the Dolphin Embassy was proposing between humans and the dolphins”

15. 3.C.City: Climate, Convention, Cruise by WORKac and Ant Farm (2015)

“3.C.City: Climate, Convention, Cruise is a speculative design for a floating city inspired by different architectural projects created by collective Ant Farm in the 1970s, including the drawings for The Dolphin Embassy. The city is designed to facilitate dialogue and debate between humans and other species, blurring the boundaries between ecology and infrastructure, public and private, the individual and the collective. Unbound by national allegiances, the design includes a vessel with housing, a research lab and an interspecies congress hall. The programme is completed with greenhouse and garden areas, an algae farm for biofuel production and a water-collection river, all covered by an inflatable wall and solar panel shingles.”

WORKac’s long section of Dolphin Embassy

“The idea is that it’s a floating city not bound by any national borders. People can come together to live in a different way and discuss important issues of the day.”

16. Biogas Power Plant by SKREI (2017)

“According to the London Assembly one year’s worth of the average urban borough’s food waste could generate enough electricity to power a local primary school for over ten years. Biogas Power Plant is a prototype for an individual biogas production unit which could use domestic waste to create and store energy to make houses self-sufficient. The unit is designed to be connected to the National Grid yet able to operate without relying on an external power supply or waste-management system.”

Biogas Power Plant by SKREI (2017) Photograph by the author.

17. Island House In Laguna Grande, Corpus Christi, Texas by Andres Jaque/Office for Political Innovation, with Patrick Craine (2015-ongoing)

“The fifty-island archipelago of Laguna Grande, on the south coast of Texas, is one of the biggest wild island-barriers of the world. This archipelago contains some of the most ancient animal and vegetal species adapted to saline aquatic ecosystems and protects the lagoon from the pollution resulting from the nearby presence of oil platforms. The islands are the habitats where mammals and other coastal species overnight, and they are endangered by the combined effects of climate change and the incremental increase in the acidity of the water. Island House in Laguna Grande is not designed as an architecture for humans, but built instead to empower the environmental diversity of Laguna Grande. The structure collects and preserves rainwater and, through the mediation of sensors on the ground, sprays water to dilute toxicity and combat drought.”

Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation with Patrick Craine, Island House in Laguna Grande, Corpus Christi, Texas, 2015-ongoing © Courtesy of the artists

18. Soil Procession by Futurefarmers (2015)

“On June 13, 2015 a procession of farmers carried soil from their farms through the city of Oslo to its new home at Losæter. Soil Procession was a GROUND BUILDING ceremony that used the soil collected from over 50 Norwegian farms from as far north as Tromsø and as far south as Stokke, to build the foundation of the Flatbread Society Grain Field and Bakehouse. A procession of soil and people through Oslo drew attention to this historical, symbolic moment of the transition of a piece of land into a permanent stage for art and action related to food production. At high noon, farmers gathered at the Oslo Botanical Gardens joined by city dwellers. Tractors, horses, wagons, wheelbarrows, musical instruments, voices, sheep, boats, backpacks and bikes processed to Losæter where the farmers’ soil offerings were laid out upon the site and a Land Declaration was signed.”

Seed Procession 2016 by Futurefarmers. Part of Seed Journey (2016–ongoing). Photograph by Monica Lovdahl. Courtesy of Futurefarmers

19. The Meteorological Garden / Central Park, Taichung, Taiwan, 2012 to 2019 by Philippe Rahm architectes, in collaboration with mosbach paysagistes and Ricky Liu & Associates

“The ambition of our project is to give back the outdoors to the inhabitants and visitors by proposing to create exterior spaces where the excesses of the subtropical warm and humid climate of Taichung are lessened. The exterior climate of the park is thus modulated so to propose spaces less hot (more cold, in the shade), less humid (by lowering humid air, sheltered from the rain and flood) and less polluted (by adding filtered air from gases and particle matters pollution, less noisy, less mosquitoes presence).”

Installation view of photos and models of The Meteorological Garden / Central Park, Taichung, Taiwan (2011 – 2019) by Philippe Rahm architectes in collaboration with mosbach paysagistes, Ricky Liu & Associates. Photograph by the author.

20. The Green Machine by Studio Malka Architecture (2014)

“The Green Machine is a mobile structure intended to regenerate and fertilise the ground of the Sahara Desert, one of the world’s most inhospitable climates. Resembling an oil platform that has been made redundant by dried-up seas, the project is a self-sufficient urban oasis able both to exploit the rich resources of the desert and to provide food, water, housing and energy for a local community. This concept resembles available technologies to generate a structure that could produce 20 million tonnes of crops each year in a hostile environment. Solar towers, wind turbines and balloons that capture water through condensation come together with the inventive use of modified caterpillar treads that plough, water and sow the soil as the autonomous structure slowly moves across the land.”

The Green Machine (2014) by Studio Malka Architecture. Courtesy of the artist

21. win >< win by Rimini Protokoll (Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel)

The last exhibit in the show requires you to wait in a queue to go through a sliding door. There’s a roped off queue stations, like in my local post office, and a big digital clock counting off the seconds till the next batch of visitors can go in. What are you queueing for?

Once through the sliding door, a small number of people (nine, I think) can sit on two low, shallow curved benches only a couple of yards away from a wall, and into that wall has been cut an enormous circle of glass. It is an aquarium! A massive aquarium in which are swimming quite a few, maybe as many as twenty beautiful jellyfish, about a foot in diameter, slowly wafting around what is clearly a large space behind the wall, lit by a gentle blue illumination.

There are headphones for each visitor and if you put them on you then listen to a 16-minute-long audiopiece about these jellyfish. You learn that they are Moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) and that they can be found in oceans around the world. And the audioguide goes on to give a dramatic description of the fight or survival which is coming, which has already started, among the world’s species as air and sea temperatures increase, CO2 levels increase, and ecosystems around the world are devastated.

And guess who many ecologists think are likely to win? As far as I can tell this video includes the entire audio track.

Exhibition participants

Virgil Abloh (Rockford, US)
Ant Farm (Chip Lord, Doug Michels and Curtis Schreier) (California, US)
Nerea Calvillo (Madrid, Spain)
Carolina Caycedo (London, UK)
Dunne & Raby (London, UK / New York City, US)
Olafur Eliasson Hon RA (Copenhagen, Denmark)
Futurefarmers (San Francisco, US and Gent, Belgium)
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (London, UK)
Tue Greenfort (Holbæk, Denmark)
HeHe (Le Havre, France)
Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation (Madrid, Spain / New York City, US)
Basim Magdy (Asyut, Egypt)
Malka Architecture (Paris, France)
Philippe Rahm architectes (Paris, France)
Rimini Protokoll (Berlin, Germany)
SKREI (Porto, Portugal)
Unknown Fields (London, UK)
Ana Vaz and Tristan Bera (Brasília, Brazil / Paris, France)
WORKac (New York City, US)
Pinar Yoldas (Denizli, Turkey)

Thoughts

I laughed out loud when I read the wall label claiming that the exhibits are: ‘provocative responses’ which amount to ‘a wake-up call urging us to acknowledge and become conscious of our impact on our environment’.

A wake-up call to who? To the several thousand middle-aged, middle-class, well-educated types who visit the Royal Academy? I think you’ll find they are already super-awake, over-awake. It’s not the behaviour of a few score thousand posh people in London you have to influence: it is the behaviour of billions and billions of poor people around the world.

As for us rich people, Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 2010 to 2016, a few years ago gave a simple recipe:

become vegetarian
sell your car
never take another plane flight
review all your investments, pensions and savings and transfer them to carbon-free, environmentally friendly sectors

They’re just the most basic, elementary steps which all of us should take. And will we? No.

More Royal Academy reviews

More Royal Academy reviews