After the End of the World

In the coming decades, humankind will face one of the most complex challenges it has had to address in its history. In the second half of the 21st century, we will have to stop emitting CO2 into the atmosphere forever. After the End of the World is a spatial essay on the present and future of climate change: a voyage to the landscapes of the Anthropocene planet; and a conversation with the humans and non-humans of the year 2100.

Artists, philosophers, heaps of sand, novelists, sea creatures, playwrights, plants, architects, objects, speculative designers and scientists have worked together to imagine situations, to tell stories and to devise strategies for survival and peaceful cohabitation in the world to come. The result is a hypnotic and startling experience, one that exposes the trauma caused by the magnitude of the crisis and the disappearance of the world we once knew, but also one that speaks of the opportunity for change and of the pressing need for an intergenerational pact.

After the End of the World consists of eight immersive installations in the exhibition gallery, a base for participative experimentation and action in the public space of the city of Barcelona, and the design and launch of a Ministry of the Future to formulate very long-term policies with the aim of examining the conditions of inequality, temporality and the various dimensions of the crisis.

The participants in After the End of the World include a coalition of humans and non-humans, some of whom have a name that they go by, notably: the German documentary theatre company Rimini Protokoll (Germany), who will be offering a dramatic experience on the animal species that will be the winners and losers in the climate crisis; Tomás Saraceno (Argentina), presenting the Aeroceno space agency, a utopian architectural project that envisages the atmosphere as a new territory for human expansion; and the Unknown Fields Division (Kate Davies + Liam Young) (UK), running expeditions into the Anthropocene that take us on a journey through the global infrastructures of fashion while exploring the planetary landscapes of desire. Charles Lim (Singapore) will give the first presentation of his research into the terraforming of Singapore, a country made of artificial sand at war with the rising sea. The curatorial satellite photography platform Overview (US) presents us with an installation that shows the reality of the Earth’s new skin. The fiction design studio Superflux (India/UK) transports us to an apartment in the year 2050, a time when droughts and hurricanes have altered our dietary routine. The engineer and artist Natalie Jeremijenko (Australia), an influential figure in the field where art meets science, will be installing the headquarters of her Environmental Health Clinic in the exhibition, thereby constructing new and mutually beneficial relationships between the various lifeforms that live alongside each other in the city.

The exhibition will also feature a staged prologue by Kim Stanley Robinson (US), one of the leading figures in contemporary sci-fi writing, and an essay-cum-installation in five chapters by the philosopher Timothy Morton (UK), the father of “dark ecology” and of the concept of “hyperobjects.”

After the End of the World also includes a base for experimentation and participatory action in the public space of the city of Barcelona, a City Station. Based on the conceptual framework proposed by the engineer and artist Natalie Jeremijenko, the Station houses her Environmental Health Clinic and consists of a series of infrastructures to carry out participatory actions where citizens contribute actively to improving environmental health. Activity takes the form of a series of recipes to improve the quality of the soil and the air, or increase green space and biodiversity.

Curator: José Luis de Vicente

Project Director: Rosa Ferré

Press images & videos are available here

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