Pacific Aquarium
Oslo Architecture Triennale: After Belonging: On Residence, 2016
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
Venue:
Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture DOGA, Oslo, Norway
Curators: luís Alexandre Casanovas, Ignacio González Galán, Carlos Mínguez Carrasco, Alejandra Navarrete Llopis, and Marina Otero Vezier
On view:
September 8 - November 27, 2016
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:
Nine 45x45x160cm models
Click for more information about the Pacific Aquarium project.