Presentation of my paper “Critical Zones and Thought Exhibitions” at the symposium ‘Representing the More Than Human’ at Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture, Section of Landscape Architecture on the occasion of the launch of Spool – Landscape Metropolis 11 (2025). Special issue: More Than Human.
Big thanks to Anna Neuhaus, Inge Bobbink, and Saskia de Wit for facilitating both the special issue and the symposium!
This paper discusses the notion of ‘thought exhibition’ proposed by the late Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel at ZKM Centre for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany). The analysis particularly considers the last of the exhibitions developed by Weibel and Latour under this curatorial concept, ‘Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics’ (2020–22), the conceptual preparation of which the author has been a part of. Critical Zones utilized the spatio-aesthetic capacities of an exhibition to test, in the mode of an embodied thought experiment, a relational understanding towards the world inhabited and shaped by interdependent lifeforms. A world which only artificially, through Western hegemonial thought and actions, can be separated into somewhat detached spheres of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, where inhabitants of the latter demote the former as resources to be extracted. This paper discusses the spatio-aesthetic experimentation enabled by the exhibition to challenge such dichotomist separations. It investigates the curatorial concept by focusing on two central works, ‘CZO Space’ (2020) by Alexandra Arènes & Soheil Hajmirbaba and ‘Flash Point (Timekeeper)’ (2018) by Sarah Sze. As ‘cosmograms’ (John Tresch, Bruno Latour), both works describe a relationship to a world that is not one of coherence and dominance but that respects its particularities and assemblages.
