CALM BEFORE THE STORM
10 December 2022 - 12 February 2023
Edward Clydesdale Thomson
Armando D. Cosmos
Tuomas A. Laitinen
Jumana Manna
Neda Saeedi
Emilija Škarnulyté
Elisa Strinna
Jun Zhang
Delft
The Netherlands
TUOMAS A. LAITINEN, ΨZONE (COCOON), 2022, PHOTO: GUNNAR MEIER, © RADIUS CCA
In 2006, the icy tranquility of glaciers and frozen tundra in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, one of the northernmost inhabited areas of the world, was disrupted. At one hundred and twenty meters deep in a sandstone mountain, the construction of the World Seed Bank—the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) in English—began. The vault stores the largest variety of plant seeds in the world, built to prevent their loss as a result of possible regional or global crises, for example, the seed banks in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, destroyed as a result of war, or the national seed bank of the Philippines, lost to floods and fires. The SGSV, popularly nicknamed Doomsday Seed Vault and the Frozen Garden of Eden, is testimony of human underground escapism in light of disastrous events triggered by the increasingly looming environmental breakdowns. Underground vaults culture, from seed banks to bunkers to nuclear waste storage, provides humans with shelter from self-brought fatality. The last chapter of Underland presents a series of artworks that provide insight into the increasing need for preservation and shelter against a progressively volatile and unpredictable living environment. How can humanity resist ecological breakdown by means of science and technology, creativity, and ingenuity? How can artistic and design practices propose ways to live in the Anthropocene and pioneer in consideration of all living organisms on Earth?
Human-created nuclear residue is both a millennia’s worth of toxic waste and a source of renewable energy—even though only one-third of nuclear waste has been repurposed. However, the materials used in nuclear power not only are nonrenewable, but also toxic. Nuclear residue is mostly stored in underground repositories designed to outstretch into a nonhuman future. Nevertheless, nearly all of the nuclear power plants in the United States have run out of storage space, and consequently the nuclear industry is resorting to other methods that imply storing nuclear waste out in the open air within the premises of the reactor site. It is only a matter of time, therefore, that nuclear waste is left closer and closer to human and nonhuman life, increasing the threat of radioactive disasters.
As a response to these risks, bunker living is presented as a potential solution. Doomsday luxury real estate is a thriving business offering salvation to the very rich in remote locations far from nuclear targets, earthquake-prone zones, and dense urban areas where contagion propagates faster in viral outbreaks. Bunkers do not offer any solution beyond an illusion of freezing time in apocalyptic eventualities, and it is no less anthropocentric than climate change when the only species to save are the wealthy. Not dissimilarly, some corporations are investing in science not to reverse the current climate regime but to escape from it and start anew by means of colonising another planet. Elon Musk’s company Space X has the only purpose to populate Mars with one million people by 2050 and make it a “free planet not governed by the laws of Earth”. The commodification of the cosmos is the latest goal of advanced capitalism, which aims to turn science fiction into reality. Even so, both inner and outermost strategies for the Post-Anthropocene, despite seeming revolutionary, are but continuations of the Anthropocene in its social, political, and ethical standpoints.
Postapocalyptic fictions have long been a popular subgenre of science fiction: from alien invasion to zombie apocalypse, from technological singularity to environmental disaster. Most commonly, these fictions distort contemporary societal, ecological, and political concerns into tales of self-reliance within structures of lost order. The frameworks in which humans used to operate are mostly gone, and chaos has taken over. Survival is the only purpose, and the future lays heavy on the shoulders of an exceptional few. This Atlas-like narrative is sustained by the Social Darwinism’s use of ‘survival of the fittest’, which explains how unbearably white, heterosexual, and cisgender male presenting fictional heroes tend to be. The end of the world, different from the end of the Earth, is the end of modern civilization, yet paradoxically what is born afresh in postapocalyptic fictions are narrow-minded repetitions of what precisely caused catastrophe in the first place: human exceptionalism.
Educator and researcher Stephanie Wakefield argues that doomsday-driven fictions and enterprises rarely offer blueprints to overcome the current climate regime, but instead they represent headlong rushes towards salvation. Wakefield claims that in order to work out the complexities of the ecological crisis, we ought to acknowledge that we are not only living in the Anthropocene, but also, and more specifically, in its “back loop”: a time of release, fragmentation, and great potential for reorientation. In realising the capacity to experiment within the fickle and unsafe planetary situation, how should we refactor our speculative capabilities to come to grips with alternative modes of inhabiting planet Earth?