Pacific Aquarium / Milano Triennale
XXII Milano Triennale: Broken Nature - Design Takes on Human Survival, 2019
Curatorial team: Paola Antonelli, Ala Tannir, Laura Maeran and Erica Petrillo
February 28 - August 31, 2019
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:
Three 45x45x160 cm models
Six 60x60 cm drawings
Project Team:
El Hadi Jazairy + Rania Ghosn
Design phase: Reid Fellenbaum, Ya Suo, Jia Weng, Shuya Xu, Saswati Das, with initial contributions from Rixt Woudstra
Installation phase: Alaa Quraishi, Namjoo Kim, Ammar Ahmed, Alexandra Chen
Click for more information about the Pacific Aquarium project.