The Planet After Geoengineering
2020-21 CAST International Performance or Exhibition Fund
Speculative futures for planet Earth
About
The term “geoengineering” refers to a set of technologies that offsets the effects of anthropogenic climate change by deliberately intervening in planetary systems. While largely speculative and unproven, such large-scale technological proposals mostly circulate in abstract climate models that are produced and discussed by experts in earth science and engineering. How do we engage speculatively—and make public—such interventions in earth systems? The Planet After Geoengineering deploys a geographic speculative method to imagine how a proposed climate manipulation program or project is likely to produce a livable world 200 years from now.
Commissioned for the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale and responding to the theme, “How will we live together?,” The Planet After Geoengineering tracks five geoengineering technologies in a series of 25 large-scale drawings that make visible geographies of deployments—sites, forms, externalities, the color of the sky, the smell of the air—and situates future promises within the genealogies of modern climate control technologies ranging from 19th-century rainmaking machines to Cold War weather modification schemes. In drawings and narratives, The Planet After Geoengineering makes geoengineering and its controversies public, inviting the viewer to interrogate the expansion of engineering (and by extension, design) to the scale of the planet.
In addition to the drawings installed in the Biennale’s As One Planet exhibition, the project includes an animation with music by Christine Southworth and Evan Ziporyn, and a graphic novel featuring essays by geographer Kathryn Yusoff, theorist Benjamin Bratton, and climate intervention researcher Holly Jean Buck.
Schedule
Past Events
The Planet After Geoengineering
May 22 – November 21, 2021
2020 Venice Architecture Biennale
Giardini della Biennale, Venice, Italy
Collaborators
Rania Ghosn is Associate Professor of architecture and urbanism at MIT and founding partner, with El Hadi Jazairy, of DESIGN EARTH. Ghosn’s research engages the territories of technological systems to address aesthetic and political concerns for architecture and urbanism in the age of the environment. Her scholarship integrates geography in a design methodology that brings together spatial history, geographic representation, speculative design, and public assemblies.
MIT CAST Profile: Rania Ghosn
Biography: MIT Architecture Department
Website: design-earth.org
El Hadi Jazairy is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan and currently Research Scientist at the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism where his research focuses on Urbanism and Energy Systems. He is also the founding partner of the award-winning practice DESIGN EARTH.
Biography: MIT School of Architecture + Planning
Website: design-earth.org
In the Media
“In the midst of a climate crisis, DESIGN EARTH thinks with and against technologies that counteract the effects of anthropogenic climate change by deliberately intervening in Earth systems.” – e-flux, 2021