The exhibition Eco-Visionaries: Art and Architecture after the Anthropocene was inaugurated on April 11th 2018 at MAAT - Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, in Lisbon. Curated by Pedro Gadanho and Mariana Pestana, the show presents works of more than 35 artists, architects and designers that critically reflect on environmental changes and how human activity is affecting the planet.
Anthropocene is a concept created by the atmospheric chemist and Nobel Prize-winner Paul Crutzen. During a conference in 2000, he announced the end of Holoceno - the geological period that the human race is being living for the last 12 hundred years - and presented the ideia of this new era, characterised mainly by the impact of the human action on the planet [2]. While the term is still on discussion between geologists, it is already on use and debated on other fields. Eco-Visionaries is the second "manifesto-exhibition" produced at MAAT and was organised in collaboration with several museums in Europe, being the "first and most wide-ranging of the four exhibitions that will appear simultaneously in Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Sweden" [1]. Climate change, mass consumption, environmental crisis and ways of surviving are some of the topics explored by the selected works, which are divided into four sections: Disaster, Coexistence, Extinction and Adaptation. The show occupies the Main Gallery of the museum and I would say that is necessary at least 2 hours to explore it - but you can easily spend way more time if you want to read everything. The concept of the show, the selected artists/works and their distribution is the exhibition space are all very well done. It had been a while since I liked a group show that much. Mixing artists and architects under the same conceptual scope is one of my biggest interests and it was refreshing to visit Eco-visionaries. Here are some of the artists/architects/designers I discovered in the exhibition and examples of their works (with links):
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