Yahoo News Eco-Visionaries review – the salt flats will die and the jellyfish shall rise
‘We power our future with the breast milk of volcanoes,” whispers a seductive voice. On a big screen in the Royal Academy, dreamy aerial drone footage pans across the endless white expanse of the Bolivian salt flats, while a tank of eerie green battery juice bubbles in the corner of the room.
The narrator is recounting the poetic myth of how the Salar de Uyuni salt plain came to be. According to Aymara legend, the great white desert was formed by the breast milk and tears that flowed from Tunupa, a goddess in volcano form, who wept when her baby volcano was taken away from her.
The mountain might have another reason to weep now. The world’s tech companies have set their sights on extracting one of the planet’s largest lithium reserves from beneath the salty crust of the Salar. “Resources begin their life in sacred landscapes,” the narrator continues. It is “the lifeblood of our technological dreams … to power the global green energy revolution”.
This strange mix of poetry, science and narrative speculation sets the tone for an exhibition that is thought-provoking and frustrating in turns. Eco-Visionaries brings together artists, architects and designers whose work is inspired by our current environmental crisis. Rather than offering critical analysis or practical measures, it mostly occupies the realm of fictional scenarios and dreamy futures, veering towards climate emergency as immersive entertainment. There are some powerful moments, but overall the mood feels less visionary than plaintive, as if the problems are so far beyond our control that all we can do is make elegiac installations about them.
“We wanted to make the topic accessible to as broad an audience as possible,” says curator Gonzalo Herrero Delicado. The exhibition began life at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon last year, and extra works have been added in an attempt to please the wider RA audience, including pieces by fashion hype-priest Virgil Abloh and enviro-art darling Olafur Eliasson. Abloh’s contribution is one of his new designs for Ikea, a wooden farmhouse-style chair with one leg propped up by a doorstop – only here it is cast in bronze. It is apparently a comment on rising sea levels and the precariousness of our makeshift solutions, but it reads more like a gilded monument to the Swedish furniture giant’s PR stunt (the launch of Abloh’s furniture collection saw people camping outside stores overnight). Eliasson, meanwhile, has brought his familiar photographs of melting ice, which feels like an invitation to head to Tate Modern to see the rest.
One of the most striking contributions comes from designer-turned-artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, who has resurrected an (extinct) male northern white rhinoceros with the help of DeepMind artificial intelligence. You hear its alarming stomping and snorting before you get to the gallery where the projection is housed, to find a pixelated apparition of the beast trapped in a white room, which gradually forms into a lifelike representation of the rhino with a (sort of) life of its own. It paces back and forth, trying to understand its environment, occasionally turning to look you in the eye.
“I’m curious about the human obsession with creating new life forms while neglecting old ones,” Ginsberg says, in the show’s catalogue. “I also wanted to challenge the techno-utopian idea that we can bring extinct animals back to life. We killed all the northern white rhinos, why would we look after a new one?” If we continue down our destructive path, the work seems to say, one day simulations like Ginsberg’s might be all we have left.
Elsewhere, architects indulge in blue-sky thinking (or black-sky, depending on appetite for dystopias). François Roche’s speculative project from 2002 gets another airing, imagining a building in Bangkok that could collect dust particles and carbon monoxide from the air through electrostatics, enveloping the facade with fuzzy grey fur. There are a couple of retro-futuristic floating habitats in the apocalyptic Seasteading vein, a steampunk biogas generator, as well as a proposal for a giant moving habitable structure that would fertilise the ground of the Sahara desert. Much of it feels dated, and leaves you with the impression that architects aren’t really cut out for the challenge of what lies ahead. Which is a shame, because there is a good deal of intelligent, environmentally conscious work happening in both the architecture and design worlds, beyond the purview of this exhibition.
Saving the best until last, the final room is the most alarming of them all. Groups of visitors are divided into two separate little auditoria and instructed to put on headphones, where they are told a lengthy tale about the unstoppable rise of jellyfish – in front of a giant swirling tank of the pulsating creatures.
“We are in this crazy, unforeseen and incomprehensible situation where we are competing against jellyfish,” says one of the marine biologists narrating the story. “And they are winning.”
Rising water temperatures have been a boon for the tentacled invertebrates, which are increasingly taking over the oceans. Another voice says that half a billion jellyfish per day drift into the sea of Japan. “Warm water is a disaster for anything that breathes,” says another, “and a dream come true for anything that doesn’t breathe much, like jellyfish.”
Rimini Protokoll, the artist collective behind the work, says that pretty much everything that damages our ecosystem seems to benefit jellyfish: overfishing brings down the number of predatory fish that could reduce their number; plastic bags in the oceans kill other predators like turtles; warm water extends their breeding season. Last year a massive jellyfish invasion threatened to wipe out the fish population of the South Australian seaport Whyalla, while another influx paralysed the nuclear power plant in Swedish Oskarshamn when jellyfish plugged up the cooling water supply.
The unnerving conclusion is that humans are not long for this Earth, while jellyfish are set to inherit the planet. It’s a bittersweet ending. While we mine, harvest and burn the planet’s resources, intoxicating everything around us, at least we’re creating a nice place for our new gelatinous overlords to reign supreme.
