IS.1 – Introductory Studio g.B
ACTIVE PUBLIC SPACE
Senior Faculty: Claudia Pasquero, Carmelo Zappulla
Faculty assistant: Maria Kuptsova

ANTHROPOCENE LANDSCAPES

The studio looks at the city from a non-anthropocentric point of view, realizing that in our contemporary global world it is impossible to trace a clear distinction between nature and artifice, between landscape and city; and ultimately between the Biosphere and the Urbansphere. We can define here the Urbansphere as the global apparatus of contemporary urbanity, the dense network of informational, material and energetic infrastructures that sustain cities increasingly demanding metabolism while offsetting the fluctuations and deficiencies of the natural Biosphere. Scientist have been recognizing the fact that humans’ infrastructure has now a geological influence our planet and declare the beginning of a new epoch: The Anthropocene.
The Guardian report on Monday 29/08/16: ‘Humanity’s impact on the Earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared, according to an official expert group who presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town […]’ How does the Antropocene City look like?
Philosopher Slovoy Zizek suggests: ‘I think what we should do to confront properly the treat of ecological catastrophe it’s not to follow the all new age trend, which suggests to break out from this technological and manipulative world and to find our roots in nature but on the contrary to cut off even more these roots with nature […]. We need more alienation from our life world, from our […] spontaneous nature, we should become more artificial […] We should develop, I think, a much more terrifying new abstract materialism, a kind of mathematical universe, where there is nothing, there is just formulas technical forms and so on. The difficult thing is to find poetry and spirituality in this dimension, to recreate, if not beauty at least an aesthetic dimension in things like this […] in trash itself’ Starting from the scientific acknowledgment of the Anthropocene the studio will investigate the aesthetic value of what Zizek call ‘a terrifying from of abstract materialism’. In order to do so we will find ourselves liaising with multiple disciplines which vary from biotechnologies, to computation to craftsmanship which will enable us to design future Anthropocene Landscapes.