Pacific Aquarium
Let's Talk about the Weather: Art and Ecology in a Time of Crisis, Times Museum, 2018
Project Team:
Rania Ghosn + El Hadi Jazairy
Reid Fellenbaum, Ya Suo, Jia Weng, Shuya Xu, Saswati Das, with initial contributions from Rixt Woudstra
Venue:
Times Museum, Guangzhou, China
On view:
June 23 - August 19, 2018
Curators:
Nataša Petrešin Bachelez and Nora Razian
The Pacific Aquarium portrays the overlapping concerns of ecology and economy in the Pacific Ocean, where the projected 1 million square meters of deep-sea mining in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone could constitute the greatest footprint of human activity in what is considered the largest continuous ecological unit. The project appropriates the object of the aquarium to take aim at the abysmal distance between our selfish economic worries and the great scales of the earth. Rather than an image of the ocean that lies outside of human activity, the aquarium channels our sense of wonder to stage environmental externalities as an intimate part of the political constituency of the Earth. Each aquarium constructs a section of the world in which the externalities of resource exploitation and climate change are weaved into spatial scales, temporalities, and species beyond the human. Collectively, the nine aquariums reclaim the production of nature into public controversies by connecting political ecology with speculative design and collective aesthetic experience.
Project Details:
Eight 115x115 cm backlit drawings
Click for more information about the Pacific Aquarium project.