The Planetarian

Running through November and December 2022, 751 International Design Festival Beijing presents The Planetarian—a landmark exhibition curated by Anouchka van Driel and Anne Zhou, bringing together a diversity of global voices with the aim to shift perspectives away from a human-centered approach to the climate crisis. Through a variety of projects in design, art and science, the exhibition presents a platform for dialogue on ways to live and thrive together with the millions of other species we share our planet with, as a pertinent reminder to look beyond the lens of global politics.

The Planetarian is a fictional word. It is evocative of a multitude of possibilities without any fixed meaning. It embodies a “someone” or perhaps a “something” without precisely labeling who or what that is. It leaves space for imagination while getting straight to the heart of its matter, the question concerning our planet, its space, its body, its environment, its composition, its perpetual and accelerating change.

Through creating this fictional persona in the form of an exhibition, the aim is to provoke the question of where we might stand and place ourselves on a rapidly changing planet in an age of precarious climate. To inform this question of positioning, the exhibition seeks counsel from the power and the necessity of “wishful thinking”, as a form of visioning and motivator for acts of doing—whatever the odds, however wishful our matters may remain, facing the future with a combination of unavoidable irony and optimism mixed in.

In parallel to this, Planetarian is also the title of a Japanese visual novel depicting a post-apocalyptic world, starring a malfunctioning robot coming back to life in a dead city. This reference forms an analogy, sharing both irony combined with tiny slivers of optimism, on how life might reemerge from a broken system.

Set up as an exhibition that takes design as a point of departure, participants investigate what it would mean to design for a multispecies planet, for a world that does not seek to conserve but aims rather to catalyse and regenerate. A planet wherein we engage with nonhuman life and whole ecosystems, cultivating relations of reciprocity. Through a variety of strategies, from looking back at the life of the planet long before human existence, to examining beyond-human cultures and the life-cycles of matter, all these threads are ultimately woven into presenting the potentially of a planetary being. The exhibition comprises of three chapters, Consequences, Nonrealities and Unknowns, with each also highlighting a key sentence from the Planetarian novel, providing an evocative and poetic framework for this entangled earthly story to unfold.

The exhibition presents 19 works, including five new commissions, from ten countries around the world. Participants include: Dunne & Raby; Formafantasma; WANG Fang Lab, Lu Lu, Studio miman (collaboration); Kuang-Yi Ku & Adelaide Lala Tam; Guo Cheng; Kosuke Araki; claudeverett; Liam Young; Michael Wang; Nonhuman Nonsense; Biin Shen; Studio Ossidiana; Studio ThusThat; Study O Portable; Superflux; People’s Architecture Office

As part of the exhibition a special selection of books related to the exhibition concepts has been curated by abC (Art Book in China) and postpost.

Exhibition credits: Organizer: 751 D·Park / Curators: Anouchka van Driel & Anne Zhou / Exhibition Design: Studio miman / Translation: Guan Li, Hu Wei / Production: Beijing Witsen Construction Engineering Co. Ltd. / AV: Beijing Luhe Hengtong Technology Co. Ltd. / Graphic support: The Pin Projects / Photographic Printing: Wen Tian Imaging / Strategic Partner: R+ Production / Exhibition Support: Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Beijing.

Co-organizing entities: Exhibition Co-organizer: National Communication Center for Science and Technology, CAST / Supporting Units: Beijing People Beneficial Cultural Consumption Season; 2022 Beijing Cultural Consumption Promotion Action; Chao Fun

For further information on curatorial themes and media inquiries, please contact Jingyun He at hejingyun [​at​] gmail.com.