Critical Zones – A Hauntological Extrospection of the World

Registers of evidence, techniques and practices of making visible, and motorized machines have long constructed the Earth as an result of enforcement, as an object that can be transformed to human needs, and one that provides an almost endless quantity of resources and raw materials, thanks to which fantasies of infinite progress can become a reality.

Machines stratify the Earth; they make it an ordered expanse. The surface is represented from above by apparatuses of vision and from “within” by diagnostic apparatuses. Geology is impossible without the dialectic of surface and depth. Mining shafts, landing sites, excavations for the foundations of nuclear power plants, power plant explosions, radioactivity spreading through the Earth's body, the demarcation of borders with barbed wire, underground bunkers, and experimental biological laboratories - these are all symptoms, traces, scars that make the Earth an “infinitely porous, spongy, or cavernous texture without emptiness, caverns endlessly contained in other caverns.”^¹

From this perspective, the Earth's surface as a whole is not a “critical zone.” Critical zones are areas where there is a risk of death or disappearance, such as “white spots” on maps, warzones, radioactive spheres, or urban environments where crime, social exclusion, violence and economic deprivation abound. Critical zones include meeting and conference rooms, where decisions are made about raising interest rates; they also include demonstrations for "freedom" and anti-vaxer appearances in the media. It is as if "non-critical" zones were confined to monadological closed environments, which are designed so that encounters with others are prevented a priori.

The Critical Zones exhibition at ZKM in Karlsruhe² offers a different vision, working with tools to visualize those contexts that are increasingly being discussed in environmental discourse and which are generally framed by the theme of sustainability. Critical Zones invites the visitor to confront the “critical situation” in which the Earth finds itself, namely by exploring new variants of the coexistence of all forms of life.³ In other words, Critical Zones points out that a radical change in the “conditions of existence” is currently taking place, which has the potential to reach dystopian proportions. And, of course, the impending dystopia necessitates the conceptualization and creation of “new territories,” of a “new Earth,” an Earth that would continue to be a habitable, living rather than deathly, fossil surface.

Critical Zones draws attention to the fact that as long as the Earth is mortified, it is necessary to thematize the uninhabitability of the planet: from deforestation and road construction across the natural environment, through a polluted environment transforming everyday habits, to a (post-) biopolitics of waste materials or changes of material and urban infrastructures. “Critical zones” are these moments of transformation and transition. However, their visibilization through video essays, photographs, or installations draws attention to an implicit paradox that runs through the entire exhibition: it seems too late. It seems like whatever is made visible by artistic techniques is nothing other than the ghost of a collapsing world, and its collapse can no longer be prevented. Thinking of the “new Earth” and “new territories” is a heroic, hauntological fantasy, creating a material, visual and discursive archive full of traces of border crossings, by means of which the sustainability and “novelty” of territories becomes a dream, the doublet of material testimony. Critical Zones is conceived in the context of a “politics of things,” as the inferno of an outgoing world in which hope may shine, but which will most likely be decimated by unstoppable acceleration: the disintegration has already begun, it’s just our consciousness that is lagging behind.

And the exhibition is great, filling not only one whole wing of ZKM, but also offering information saturation in the form of websites full of accompanying material and the possibility of a virtual tour of the exhibition. Critical Zones is conceived as a multiplicity, a rhizome of different observatories. A description of the whole concept, which is of course always reductive, would follow the upward movement from the depths of the earth, to the clouds: from instruments measuring life functions, audio clusters and a “listening” to life below and on the earth's surface, through photographs and videos of the changing environment, interviews with those who are right at the epicenter of change, up to the forensic analysis of clouds and the sky.

However, it would not be ZKM if the investigation of new territories was not carried by the genealogical-archaeological tendency to make visible the threads and connections between the current state and the theoretical reflection on the state of the Earth. This way of simultaneously showing several time planes strongly emphasizes what has been lost, what cannot be revived. It evokes a non-invasive horror – a depression over the disappearing environment, over the impossibility of its revitalization.

Critical Zones is not meant for one afternoon. It is necessary to return, once or twice. Every time a person leaves the huge glass door of ZKM, one imperative keeps sounding like a phonographic tape in his head: “Take a deep breath, inhale: damage to your lungs and mucous membranes and skin irritation. The air you breathe is metallic.”⁴

Exibition: Critical Zones, The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth,
Curator: Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel, Martin Guinard, Bettina Korintenberg
ZKM (Center for Arts and Media), Karlsruhe
23.5.2020 - 09.01.2022

Text: Martin Charvát

IMAGE CAPTIONS

1 | Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies, 2020, In Kooperation mit dem ZKM | Karlsruhe und Bruno Latour, © Forensic Architecture, © ZKM | Karlsruhe, photo: Tobias Wootton
2 | Elise Hunchuck, Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Marco Ferrari with Henry Valori, Lena Geerts Danau, and Nico Alexandroff (ADS7), Sky River: Politics of the Atmosphere, 2019-2020, © The artists, © ZKM | Karlsruhe, photo: Tobias Wootton