Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani

Metakosmia

Metakos­mia, 4k, 2 chan­nel video in­stal­la­tion, 25 min., 2024

Metakos­mia is about the sur­vival in the near fu­ture in an en­vi­ron­ment that has be­come un­in­hab­it­able due to ex­treme weather phe­nom­ena. The nar­ra­tive per­spec­tive is that of an ant, ob­serv­ing a teenage girl, who lives alone at Bios­phere 2, an ar­ti­fi­cial habi­tat in the Ari­zona desert. Bios­phere 2 is a giant green­house, built in 1991 with the pur­pose of cre­at­ing a self-sus­tain­able ecosys­tem in­de­pen­dent of the out­side world. Eight vi­sion­ary artists and sci­en­tists ex­per­i­mented with liv­ing in this ar­ti­fi­cial biotope for two years to prove that life in a closed sys­tem is pos­si­ble in the long term. The spec­tac­u­lar pro­ject, whose in­vestors hoped would pro­vide in­sights into human sur­vival on lunar or mar­t­ian bases, was con­sid­ered a fail­ure at the time be­cause the car­bon diox­ide level rose un­ex­pect­edly high. Today, sci­en­tists of the Ari­zona Uni­ver­sity are con­duct­ing re­search on cli­mate re­silience at Bios­phere 2, as our so­ci­ety is fac­ing sig­nif­i­cant im­pacts from cli­mate change. Fis­cher & el Sani are in­ter­ested in Bios­phere 2 for its role today, in the age of the 6th Great Mass Ex­tinc­tion, as a pilot pro­gram for sur­vival on Earth it­self, and not, as the media com­mu­ni­cated 30 years ago, as an ex­per­i­ment for ex­trater­res­trial life. In doing so, they con­tex­tu­al­ize Lynn Mar­gulis' con­cept of Sym­bio­gen­e­sis, Stew­ard Brand's Whole Earth Cat­a­log, Buck­min­ster Fuller's Man­ual for Space­ship Earth, Donna Har­away's Posthu­man­ism, and Bruno La­tour's Ter­res­trial Man­i­festo, among oth­ers. In ad­di­tion to a two-chan­nel video in­stal­la­tion, a fic­tional nar­ra­tive of a fu­ture in which sur­vival is only pos­si­ble under glass domes, Fis­cher & el Sani show the soni­fi­ca­tion of a drought ex­per­i­ment in the rain­for­est biome of Bios­phere 2, in which cli­mate jus­tice is de­manded by na­ture it­self. The soni­fi­ca­tion is based on a data set from the Uni­ver­sity of Ari­zona and the in­ter­na­tional B2 WALD Cam­paign (Water, At­mos­phere, and Life Dy­nam­ics), which aimed to fully track, from mol­e­cules to the ecosys­tem, mech­a­nisms dri­ving the fate of car­bon and water in for­est sys­tems under drought. Metakos­mia has been re­al­ized in 2023 dur­ing Fis­cher & el Sani's fel­low­ship at Villa Au­rora in Los An­ge­les. The work has been co-funded by Villa Au­rora & Thomas Mann House e. V. and Me­di­en­board Berlin Bran­den­burg.

Video Installation
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Metakos­mia, 4k, 2 chan­nel video in­stal­la­tion, 25 min., 2024 (ex­cerpt 1 min.)