About the Exhibition
In the shadow of the climate and ecological crises, organized human life is presented with a bleak future. Our collective visions of the future seem to be perpetuating self-fulfilling death spirals of dystopias. Artefacts from the Pluriverse is an attempt at reshaping and broadening these narrow narratives of our future into more long-term sustainable visions of the future. The ‘artefacts’ exhibited here are futures designed by MA-students in Industrial Design at AHO. The common ground for these students is that they were both provoked and nudged to explore how design today can come up with a response to climate breakdown by exploring different alternative futures towards long-term sustainability.
These artefacts from the pluriverse found on the pedestals are confronted and contrasted by how things are, here illustrated by a sterile wall that reveals the ever-increasing complexity and sophistication of the systemic violence against the natural world that goes into making our technological civilisation possible. Taken apart, bit by bit, these probes of our technological civilisation reveal the sheer ingenuity and cooperative ability of our systems that can afford us the almost endless ability to invent new ways of living, despite the consequences.
Artefacts from the Pluriverse showcases a wide array of products that might make an alternative way of living, not only thinkable, but also desirable in spite of the harsh futures we might need to prepare ourselves for. These artefacts address the degradation of the oceans (Being Buoyant, PeteasyTM), distributed local energy production and storage (Speculative Solar, biomA), soil fertility (Emu Stove), food security (Being Buoyant) and water scarcity (Source). As these student projects hopefully demonstrate, the design practice of sustainability can be seen towards a more proactive approach to design whereby what could be called a “comprehensive anticipatory design science” begins to emerge. We hope that these pluriversal visions can cultivate new attitudes, choices and actions by shaping the ‘pro-actions’ required to facilitate a more sustainable future focusing on ‘quality of life’ rather than increased ‘standard of living’, in the pursuit of both human and ecological well-being.
By nurturing a more positive trajectory, this exhibition hopes to move beyond these pluriversal spaces and into the world of the here and now, into the world of climate action. By creating these alternative future possibilities, we hope to provoke and probe your imagination, inviting you to suspend disbelief and anticipate our futures together. We would love to hear from you on how we could take these provocations forward by sharing with us some ideas or perhaps in the form of cooperation that can take the visions from these spaces and into the lived realities of a future we choose to build together.
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Zhilong Luan and Xia Nan (PhD fellows at Tsinghua University, Beijing)
Jomy Joseph (PhD fellow at AHO, Oslo)
Graphic Design and Posters: Siqi Chen