If humans have any chance of saving themselves and life as we know it, we need to see the world in a whole new way — from the point of view of other species.
It’s a theory championed by the Copenhagen art collective Superflex, which builds on the philosophy that art and artists can and should play a role in the future of the world.
In 2018, for example, the artists at Superflex began a collaboration to address the anticipated environmental crisis of rising seas. They led diving expeditions around a small Pacific island belonging to Tonga with a team of scientists, including marine biologists and fish behaviorists, and started developing building materials to welcome fish as seawater encroaches upon cities around the globe.
To do so, they believed, they had to design with a fish’s vision in mind. During a visit to their studio back then, I saw prototypes of their first bricks, later known as Superbricks. Built with cracks and curves that are a departure from traditional building blocks, they were lying on a table beside the artists’ scuba suits, along with latex fish-face masks they had worn on a dive.
Their purpose was “to help see things from the fish’s point of view,” explained Jakob Fenger, one of the founders, who was poker-faced even as he slipped a fish head over his own.
That kind of thinking has placed Superflex among the innovative artists addressing the world’s ills today. Key to their philosophy and others like them is the belief that people should consider the impact on other species and work not only with fellow artists, architects and other experts, but also with communities to address those ills.
“We believe that today art is, and should be, at the forefront of making infrastructure at every possible level,” said Bjornstjerne Christiansen, one of the founders of Superflex, speaking on a panel titled “Worlds Imagined: Biodiversity and Tech” at the Art for Tomorrow conference in Milan last week. “It’s in the actual landscape-making where art has a crucial role to play.”
The conference, begun in 2015, is organized by the Democracy and Culture Foundation with panels moderated by New York Times journalists and others. It brings together voices to explore urgent issues facing artists and institutions today.
The panelists — Susanna Barla, founder and chief executive of Genesis 3.0 and Creators Fund; Beatriz Colomina, professor of architecture at Princeton University; Bettina Kames, co-founder and chief executive of the LAS Art Foundation in Berlin; and Christiansen — explored how other life-forms might inspire better ways of building. The session was moderated by Louis Jebb, managing editor of The Art Newspaper.
The panelists agreed that the way to construct a viable future is to abandon a human-centric view and design habitats to benefit Earth’s entire network of life.
As examples, Kames described an artist-designed algorithm generating gardens for bees and other pollinators, rather than for humans. Barla explained how mycelium, the underground parts of a fungus, and other nature-based organizational models could teach museums and other art institutions how to develop more effective networks for cultural funding.
Colomina called for buildings that support bacterial life. “We have empathy now with bacteria,” Colomina said. “They created the biosphere.” Yet traditionally, architecture has been “all about separation — separation from other humans, separation from other species, separation from the soil,” she said.
Christiansen added with a smile that at Superflex, “We believe that the best idea might come from a fish.”
Under the auspices of TBA21–Academy, the research arm of the art and advocacy foundation Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Superflex’s diving missions around Tonga inspired the collective to invent the first of its building blocks adapted to marine life.
Fish, they noted, are used to a seascape of curves and crevices. So while its blocks can create homes for humans, they may also suit the needs of fish displaced to urban spaces transformed by rising oceans.
An installation at a Danish university campus employed these bricks to form wiggly pathways hospitable to marine life, which induce campus-goers to move in an undulating path and perhaps to think more like fish, said Christiansen in a video interview before the conference.
The Superflex projects are designed to playfully challenge “xenophobia,” said Christiansen, as well as “people thinking they are powerless to confront climate change.”
Alice Sharp, the founder and artistic director of the climate awareness organization Invisible Dust, said in a recent interview. “Superflex has this intrinsic way of working between art and science, having collaborated with scientists for many years who are now pretty much part of their collective.”
Invisible Dust has commissioned Superflex, along with six other artists, to create site-specific works for Climate Clock, a public art trail that opens next year in Oulu, Finland. Located within the Arctic region that’s warming four times faster than Earth’s average, Oulu will become Europe’s 2026 Capital of Culture.
Superflex was founded in 1993 by Christiansen, Jakob Fenger and Rasmus Rosengren Nielsen as a collective in which each person’s ideas become the group’s ideas. Working together, “it was a natural evolution to the expanded collective — to involving all kinds of participants like scientists, architects, community members, children — and eventually other species,” Christiansen said.
In practice, their works take many forms, including pleas for tolerance. (“Foreigners please don’t leave us alone with the Danes!” read a well-known and widely distributed pro-immigration poster) and three-person swings designed for collaboration.
In a broadly exhibited video from 2009 titled “Flooded McDonald’s,” water slowly inundated a life-size replica of a McDonald’s, suggesting “the role of large multinational corporations in the escalation of climate change,” as Superflex put it.
Yet for Christiansen, Superflex is best embodied by a project that many don’t even realize is art. “Superkilen,” a wedge-shaped half-mile-long park spanning a diverse neighborhood of Copenhagen, was designed in 2012 in collaboration with the Danish firm Topotek 1 and BIG architects, together with local residents.
The project was a direct challenge to “the hierarchy of who gets to make public space,” Christiansen said, pointing one finger upward at the implicit establishment.
Copenhagen’s pluralist population — which has been threatened by a law designed to dismantle non-Western enclaves, found by an E.U. court to be discriminatory — became a source of strength for the park, he said, as residents from 50 different nationalities filled “Superkilen” with emblems of their origin countries, like a hill of soil that two young Palestinian Danes, together with Superflex, transported from their grandmother’s olive groves in their native land.
“People are riding their bicycles over this artwork,” Christiansen said of the park. “‘Superkilen’ might make people think, but possibly without them ever realizing artists were involved.”
The artists’ ongoing and most ambitious work spans the sea floor around Denmark: “Super Reef,” a vision for 21 square miles of underwater architecture, restoring the foundations to sustain marine life previously devastated by centuries of fish trawling and the extraction of construction materials. The project brings together the Danish World Wildlife Fund, marine biologists and Denmark’s residents.
When artists design infrastructure — a park, a reef — the result, said Christiansen, is “a different beginning point and a different output,” creating new ways of thinking and building.
“Humans are guided by narratives and ideas,” he said. “And artists are attuned to generating new ones, which can galvanize people to act differently.”
Superflex’s projects have put the collective in partnership with governments and civic groups. “When we go within the system,” Christiansen said, “we recognize the power we have as artists to make changes.”
And that is one of the messages the collective wants to convey. No matter where you work, “what you say or do, or what you don’t say or do, has meaning for that institution, and for the world,” said Christiansen, his hands shaping the planet in the air. “Regardless of whether you’re an activist, a politician, a banker, or anything else, you have the power to act, to participate, and to change things from within.”
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