There is no question that the world is in climate crisis, with school children on strike and increasing numbers of governments around the world declaring a climate emergency, so the theme of the XXII edition of the Triennale di Milano this year is particularly apt. Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival is an exhibition and series of international installations that explores what designers are doing to tackle the problem.
Broken Nature takes as its starting point the inevitable extinction of humans and explores the myriad ways that designers are attempting to tackle the problem. “Humanity is in peril… the strain we are placing on environmental bonds is significant, the needle measuring the tension is already in the critical zone, and the pressure is mounting,” writes Italian-born NY-based curator Paola Antonelli in the catalogue essay.
Antonelli and her co-curators Ala Tannir, Laura Maeran, and Erica Petrillo see design as a powerful analysis and repair tool, which has the ability to build the foundation of our civilisation and shape behaviours, offering human-centred approaches to problem-solving. “Even though design by itself cannot solve our existential problems (no discipline on its own truly can), it is an essential component of a well-conceived strategy of reparations.”
The exhibition features a range of different projects, including inventions, data visualisations, experiments, artefacts, products, installations and more from around the globe. Some of these have been shown elsewhere and some were commissioned especially for this exhibition, and all contribute something towards the betterment of humanity and the globe.
One of the most powerful themes in the exhibition is how it engages with the concept of extinction. Resurrecting the Sublime is a fascinating example – an attempt to extract the scent from the flower of three extinct plant species by sequencing the DNA from specimens preserved at the Harvard University Herbarium. The resulting smell evokes the sense of the sublime – both wonderful and terrifying. The project also speaks to the wonderful things that can happen when artists collaborate with scientists – in this case, artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg worked with smell researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas, and an interdisciplinary team of researchers and engineers from the biotechnology company Ginkgo Bioworks, led by Creative Director Dr. Christina Agapakis.
Also on the topic of extinction, one project showed a live octopus interacting with a long-extinct shell. With Think Evolution #1: Kiku-ishi (Ammonite), Japanese designer Aki Inomata 3D-scanned a fossil of an ammonite shell, thought to be the ancestor of octopi and squids that went extinct around the same time as the dinosaurs. The model was then 3D-printed in resin and placed in an aquarium with a small octopus. Watching a video of this living creature interact with the shell of its ancestor is a fascinating experience.
From under water to outer space, a dying star becomes a musical composition. Created by an international team of Japanese and US researchers, this project sees the radio signal data of a dying massive red giant star R Sculptoris, 1500 lightyears from earth, translated into musical sound with ALMA Music Box: Melody of a Dying Star.
Many of the projects included in the exhibition are not new, but deserve to be highlighted for their contribution to the ethical ambitions of the project. PIG 05049 was created by Christien Meindertsma (Dutch) and Julie Joliat (Swiss) who decided to track around the world all items made from a single pig called 05049 after its slaughter. They found that a single pig was used as raw material in 185 different food and non-food products. This fascinating piece of research illustrates the complexity of the supply chain in contemporary society.
Palm Stool from Can City is a mobile foundry by London design duo Studio Swine that melts discarded aluminium cans salvaged from the streets of San Paolo and forms them in sand using moulds created by found objects like a palm leaf. This project illuminates the informal economy of waste developed in Sao Paolo, with recyclable and reusable materials being collected and reformed into productive objects.
Also exploring waste reuse is Ore Streams by Amsterdam-based duo Formafantasma. Originally commissioned by NGV International in Melbourne, this project is an investigation into the recycling of electronic waste. In particular, it explores the concept of above-ground mining and a future in which the majority of metal will be found above ground in waste, rather than below ground. The office furniture created as a result of this process includes elements of electronic waste, including precious metals.
Other projects highlight ancient practices that are being revived – Il Leone delle Donne is about the practice of diving to the depths of the Mediterranean off the Sardinian shore in Italy to harvest the world’s most coveted thread – fibres created by the pen shell. This technique has been passed down by more than a thousand years of matrilineal family heritage to Chiara Vigo, who spins the fibres into thread. Likewise, The Ise Bay Project by MAP Office (Hong Kong) documents the collection of pearls by women in Japanese communities for around 1500 years – ama divers do not use scuba gear, but hold their breath.
Some projects were commissioned especially by the Triennale curators, including the Room of Change by Accurat, an incredible graphic that visualises a huge range of statistics, including “the civil war and life expectancy in Cambodia”, “the consumption of cigarettes”, “the explosion of world epidemics” and “the consumption of fossil fuel”. Repeating patterns of pastel dashes, lines, dots and other markers offer an informative and, at times, alarming, vision of our world. This project can also be viewed as a whole or in increasing levels of detail, offering a multi-layered experience of data visualisation.
Many of the projects dealt with life and death, no more so than Capsula Mundi, an egg-shaped container made of biodegradable material in which a deceased person’s ashes or body are placed. Italian designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel see humans as a part of nature’s cycle of transformation, and these pods offer an opportunity for grieving relatives to plant a tree, rather than cutting one down to make a coffin.
The Hippo Roller by South African engineers Pettie Petzer and Johan Jonker is a redesign of the water containers that many African women and children carry on their heads for up to six hours a day just to collect clean drinking water for their family. The Hippo Roller is a water transportation device that can be rolled rather than carried, drastically improving quality of life using clever design.
Another project set to change lives is Women and Heart Disease: Physician Bias and AI, a project that saw scientists from MIT and Harvard investigating the misdiagnosis of women showing heart symptoms. With illustrations by Irina Kruglova, a series of instructional posters is aimed at encouraging ER professionals to take women’s heart attack symptoms more seriously.
In addition to the Broken Nature exhibition, the Triennale also included displays from 21 international participants, invited through official government channels. Australia’s contribution – called Teatro della Terra Alienata (Theatre of the Alienated Land) – was awarded the Golden Bee award, one of three awards presented as the most deserving of exhibits (the other two were Austria and Russia). The presentation, by UTS and Grandeza Studio, documents recent massive coral bleaching events in the Great Barrier Reef and proposes a technological intervention into this process. The project is critical of the controversial decision by the Australian federal government in 2018 to give $444 million in funding to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, a charity supported by major mining and insurance companies, banks, and airlines.
The project statement reads: “The pavilion is an installation and a curatorial project that addresses the urgency raised by the United Nations IPCC’s report published in 2018. The alarming document framed the decay of the Great Barrier Reef as part of a wicked problem that demands radical national and global political action, along with new imaginaries and aesthetics of the natural.” In focusing on this singular yet vast problem that is uniquely Australian, the project offers a clear link between the work of designers and the potential to save a territory currently under threat of total environmental destruction.
Other international presentations chose to focus on design in a more holistic light. The Finnish expo, Everyday Experiments, covered a range of socially and environmentally forward-thinking initiatives, including examples such as Job’d, a program creating socially-responsible job opportunities for young people, an Oyster Mushroom Grow Kit for kitchen gardens and a technology called Ioncell that makes textile production and consumption more sustainable with the help of bio-based cellulose. The exhibition also includes an impressive presentation of Indigenous objects, including craft textile hats, shoes, knives and more.
Probably my favourite international exhibit, though, is the completely weird and out-there contribution from the Czech Republic, which imagined a world called Lithopy: “a future utopic land where life is based on lithium reserves, blockchain and satellites”. The project was inspired by lithium, which was recently rediscovered in Czech Lands, and is a multi-screen movie with a fairy-tale meets science fiction feel, complete with futuristic outfits, singing and strange actions and movements. This fantastic humorous imaginary world is from the minds of Denisa Kera and Petr Šourek, curated by the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague with a huge team of collaborators (more here).
Currently on show at the Triennale Milano Museum in Milan, this project reinstates the tradition of the international exhibition La Triennale Di Milano after a 20-year hiatus. Massive in scope and visionary in its curatorial imagination, Broken Nature proves that designers are working at the forefront of human futures, and that this, indeed, is the future of design.
More on Broken Nature
Hi Penny. Thank you for bringing this exhibition to a wider attention. I also saw it in Milan, but sadly I am not able to be as positive about it as you were. For a start the title: surely it is humanity which is broken not nature?! Not a good omen for what follows, if we can’t admit that!
I really wanted to be inspired, but it just didn’t happen. I had the uncomfortable feeling that too much of it was staged, both the design idea and the exhibiting of it. I didn’t come away with any revelations about great solutions being discovered. It was more like rather superficial entertainment. And you had to read so much text to make any sense of what you were seeing. Some exhibits, such as the room of mirrors, were wantonly wasteful, while giving nothing. Like you said, all was not new, such as the rolling water carrier and also Capsula Mundi which I saw in Milan in 2001. I loved it at the time, but surely there have been advances since then?!
Given the incredible resources available, I thought that the show was a sad let down. We desperately need inspiring and motivating, but I didn’t get it here.
Thanks for your comment David! I agree that there must have been advances since some of the older projects came out and, if not, more needs to be done to make sure designers continue to push the boundaries for the benefit of society/nature. As for the name, I think the idea is that we have ‘broken’ our connection to nature. And I actually enjoyed the extended captions, but maybe that’s just me being a word person. I think this is such an important topic that I still feel the exhibition/topic was worthwhile over all. I hope to see more designers engaging with these issues and less on luxury design as we move forward. All the best, Penny