The Planetarian

Beijing, 2022

Commissioned by 751 International Beijing Design Festival, I curated the exhibition The Planetarian with Anouchka van Driel. I also created the exhibition design and led fabrication and production.

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.

The landmark exhibition for Beijing Design Week 2022 brought 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.

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.

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.

Curators: Anne Zhou and Anouchka van Driel

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 concept has been curated by abC (Art Book in China) and postpost.  Organizer: 751 D·Park / 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.

*Images courtesy of 751 and participating artists