黑料不打烊

THE OBSERVATORY: ART AND LIFE IN THE CRITICAL ZONE revolves around the intricate relationships among humans, animals, plants, earth material, and other forms of life. The exhibition brings together a collection of new and existing artworks by twenty-six artists who, in diverse ways, actively engage with the multifaceted elements present in the 鈥渃ritical zone.鈥� These elements encompass a wide range, spanning from earthworms and oil birds to imagined beach creatures and resilient potatoes, from indigenous landscapes and micro-territories to rainwater and archives of rural-based alternative communities across Europe and West Asia. The artists have employed painting, drawing, video, sculpture, performance, workshops, agriculture, and other means of expression, which will co-exist in a dynamic display at S枚dert盲lje Konsthall.

As a term, 鈥渢he critical zone鈥� was coined in the early 2000s by earth scientists in order to grapple with the heterogeneous, near surface environment in which complex interactions involving rock, soil, water, air, and living organisms regulate the natural habitat and determine the availability of life-sustaining resources. Instead of thinking in terms of nature and culture, and a dichotomy between the two, geoscientists, hydrologists, micro-biologists, and pedologists developed this integrative approach to overcome the divide between disciplines and methodologies.

Acknowledging the urgency of the rampant climate crisis, they not only created a new term but also a new methodology: the critical zone is predicated on the notion that the interconnections of all entities within the zone are inescapable. Something which indigenous people, among others, have known and practiced all along. Another objective of the earth scientists in coining the term was to disrupt the discourse on the planet鈥檚 dire circumstances, aiming to foster a new approach to earthly politics necessitated by the ecological crisis.

With the aim of facilitating this kind of integrated research within chemical, physical, and biological processes, critical zone observatories were established. The observatories are research stations with different aims, located in Austria, the Czech Republic, Greece, Peru, the United States, as well as other places. Within the critical zone laboratories, the previously established top-down cartographic depiction of the Earth from the Holocene geological era is undergoing disintegration. As it happens, this is the moment when we are entering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. For the first time ever, human activity has a significant impact on the climate and the eco-systems, something which is highly palpable in the critical zone.