Is the new environmental awareness emerging in museums?

What are some places and opportunities that allow us to increase our awareness of the environmental crisis afflicting our planet? Politicians seem to avoid the topic, especially in Italy, leaving many scientific appeals unanswered. The media alternate between catastrophic news and indifference, privileging the impact the news has rather than giving a proper explanation of causes and effects. Then, museums take the challenge head-on, presenting themselves as a place for debate and education. And so in the past few years, we saw expositions and events by small and big museums that focus on the environmental crisis multiplying.

By featuring artists that made of climate change the subject of their work, but also scientific documents and archives, witnesses and clues, museums have become sounding board of controversial criticism and complaints, to which society pays too little attention. Facing each time various aspects of the crisis, from global warming to the reduction of biodiversity, from deforestation to the atmospheric changes, museums have increasingly become a place for the exhibition of criticism, even more than art, whose objective is not to simply (and only) arouse aesthetic emotions but to create shapes of ethical awareness.

The designer duo Formafantasma (formed by Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin) is undoubtedly among the stars of this transformation. Considering that the role of design is rooted beyond the concept of the object, in the complexity of its systems (economic, extractive, manufacturing, industrial, etc.) of production and distribution, the two designers, who trained at the Design Academy Eindhoven where they now teach, started a few years ago to create a series of investigations on specific materials connected to design and the environmental impact of human practices.

Their project “Cambio,” started in 2020 at the Serpentine in London and then moved to other European museums, set the tone with an all-encompassing exploration of wood. Right now, at the Nasjonalmuseet, the National Gallery of Oslo, their new exhibition entitled “Otlre Terra” puts wool and the long relationship between humans and sheet under the spotlight. The visitors are welcomed by a highly refined stenographic device, which is placed at the center of a huge room, showing on rotation objects, documents, and videos. Then, accompanied by the powerful texts of the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, they follow a path made of 8 stations that focus on different aspects of the complex concatenation between human and animal needs, between nature and culture, between economy, mythology, and folklore.

The image that opens the exhibition is emblematic: a merino sheep that ran away from the flock in Australia and was found after a long time completely stuck because of its own wool which had grown in uncontrollably due to lack of shearing. This episode is the key to reading the whole exhibition and it sheds light on the cohabitation and cooperation processes between humans and animals. Many controversial points emerge in the background, such as the standardization of wool, the accumulation of waste from the textile industry, cloning, which makes sheep an industrial product, and the forced introduction of pastures that destroy the local ecosystems.
 

If the connection to the environmental crisis seems to be clear, the one with design is more subtle. As Farresin and Trimarchi explain “the format of our exhibition (which is a hybrid of an anthropological/natural history/applied arts museum) aims to stress the complete lack of context in the way design is narrated and represented in applied arts museums. For this, it is important for us that Oltre Terra is read as a design exhibition” – but a type of design that is not simply an object, but also an ecosystem or a “co-evolution” process” that implies in a rooted interdependence both human and non-human subjects. Just like the opening image, even the image that closes the exhibition is symbolic: non a sheep that has lost contact with men, but a woman who pets a sheep. The movie Tactile Afferents by Formafantasma with the artist Joanna Piotrowska brings to light, in a poetic way, the reciprocity of contact, the tactile and emotional dimension that opposes the unilateral vision of domestication and exploitation.

“Per una nuova coscienza ambientale” – for a new environmental awareness – is the subtitle-manifesto of another exhibition currently open: it’s the “BioGrounds” project, curated by Domitilla Dardi for Maxxi, presented at the current Venice Biennale of Architecture. Instead of being on display in a white cube of a museum, the work commissioned to duos of artists and curator-thinkers infiltrate the lagoon landscape of La Certosa island, composed of sparse woods and glades, ancient ruins, and modern architecture. Rather than objects and installations that occupy the space, the project stages actions that animate the garden and the cloister of La Certosa, seeking to engage the public in a dialogue with the living beings inhabiting them. Here, we can see again Emanuele Coccia and the Studio Formafantasma, who literally give voice to a poplar tree, and the designer Andrea Anastasio who, along with the critic and curator Angela Rui, has disseminated the woods with dens for the animals. And then again we can see Studio Ossidiana, who has imagined a fence that protects a garden filled with seeds the visitors threw inside, then the architects and video-artists Beka & Lemoine who, in collaboration with the botanist Stefano Mancuso, author of The Nation of Plants, has programmed a series of performances as a tribute to another tree, the hackberry, which is called “stone breaker” in Italian because it grows in between stones. On the inauguration day, a choir sang folk songs.  

As Domitilla Dardi explains, “these actions, rather than production the umpteenth object, define architecture as an emotional space. They fill an ancient architectural space with bodies and sounds, evoke atavistic memories, and move us. Contrary to what museums increasingly offer, that is image-works, something Instagrammable, the experience of these collective rituals is fundamentally unspeakable.” The choice of taking art out of a museum, or rather of “making a museum” elsewhere, in situ, makes it possible to escape the rhetoric of the climate crisis in order to directly engage with natural elements – like the violent storm that hit the region during the installation stage of the project. “We must rely on the unreliable,” repeats Dardi, in order to raise real awareness. Understanding the climate crisis is understanding our fragility, not only or rather not simply through the rationality of data and documents but through an emotional experience. This is one of the greatest challenges that awaits the museums of today and tomorrow.

Opening image: Lo Spaccasassi by Beka & Lemoine with botanist Stefano Mancuso