The sixth edition of the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, Nature, explores the human relationship with the natural world, focusing particularly on environmental crises and the extinction of animal and plant species. The show assembles more than 60 projects by international teams of artists, designers, scientists, engineers, environmentalists and others and is organised into seven sections involving different strategies for collaborating with nature, including to understand, simulate, salvage, facilitate, augment, remediate and nurture. The show has been jointly organised with the Cube design museum in Kerkrade, Netherlands, where it is being shown simultaneously until 20 January 2020. Here are some of the highlights:
This video installation brings back to life the last male northern white rhino, Sudan, using AI-generated data. On 19 March last year, Sudan died in Kenya, bringing his subspecies to the brink of extinction and generating worldwide discussion on the impact of humans on wildlife. Since then, a series of controversial experimental biotechnologies have been proposed to resurrect the subspecies using Sudans genetic material. The rhino in the work develops from a series of pixels to a lifelike animal and moves around a small room. The work aims to question what errors can occur when humans attempt to recreate life artificially and underlines the impossibility of resurrecting extinct species.
Reminiscent of Tibetan sky burials, in which all parts of the deceased are returned to the earth, this burial suit made from mycelium spores aims to curtail conventional Western funerary options (burial and cremation) that release toxic chemicals into the environment. The suits “biomix” aids decomposition, through which the dead are turned into mushrooms. Lee, a Korean artist, devised the Infinity Burial Project as part of her graduate programme at MIT, where she explored unorthodox recycling systems that aim to reimagine humans relationship with death.
The Nairobi-based group Cave Bureau, headed by the artist Stella Mutegi, has reimagined the 2.5 million-year-old Mbai Cave as a museum. The popular tourist site northeast of Nairobi held late Stone Age artefacts and once served as a refuge for Mau Mau rebels but is now heavily littered. The group surveyed the cave for the first time with 3-D scanning technology, revealing records of human activity there throughout time. With this project, the group hopes that the National Museums of Kenya will reclassify the cave—described as an important Anthropogenic site, or one keyed to the impact of human activity—as a museum and to host educational programmes there. A museum testifying to the so-called Anthropocene era “already exists”, Mutegi explains. She adds, “It exists around the world as sites and artefacts that hold records of humanitys impact on this planet”.
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