TY - JOUR

T1 - Critical Zones and Thought Exhibitions

AU - Irrgang, Daniel

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2025, TU Delft. All rights reserved.

PY - 2025/7/19

Y1 - 2025/7/19

N2 - This paper discusses the notion of ‘thought exhibition’ proposed by the late Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel at ZKM | Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany) and some of its most central approaches to imagining new relationships to the world we inhabit. The analysis particularly considers the last of the exhibitions developed by Weibel and Latour under this curatorial concept, Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics (2020–22), the conceptual preparation of which the author took part in. Critical Zones utilized the spatio-aesthetic capacities of an exhibition to test, in the mode of an embodied thought experiment, a relational understanding of the world inhabited and shaped by interdependent lifeforms—a world that only artificially, through Western hegemonic thought and actions, can be separated into somewhat detached spheres of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, where inhabitants of the latter demote the former to resources to be extracted. This paper discusses the spatio-aesthetic experimentation enabled by the exhibition to challenge such dichotomous separations. It investigates the curatorial concept by focusing on two central works: CZO Space (2020) by Alexandra Arènes & Soheil Hajmirbaba and Flash Point (Timekeeper) (2018) by Sarah Sze. As ‘cosmograms’ (John Tresch, Bruno Latour), both works describe a relationship to a world that is not one of coherence and dominance but that respects its particularities and assemblages.

AB - This paper discusses the notion of ‘thought exhibition’ proposed by the late Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel at ZKM | Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany) and some of its most central approaches to imagining new relationships to the world we inhabit. The analysis particularly considers the last of the exhibitions developed by Weibel and Latour under this curatorial concept, Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics (2020–22), the conceptual preparation of which the author took part in. Critical Zones utilized the spatio-aesthetic capacities of an exhibition to test, in the mode of an embodied thought experiment, a relational understanding of the world inhabited and shaped by interdependent lifeforms—a world that only artificially, through Western hegemonic thought and actions, can be separated into somewhat detached spheres of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, where inhabitants of the latter demote the former to resources to be extracted. This paper discusses the spatio-aesthetic experimentation enabled by the exhibition to challenge such dichotomous separations. It investigates the curatorial concept by focusing on two central works: CZO Space (2020) by Alexandra Arènes & Soheil Hajmirbaba and Flash Point (Timekeeper) (2018) by Sarah Sze. As ‘cosmograms’ (John Tresch, Bruno Latour), both works describe a relationship to a world that is not one of coherence and dominance but that respects its particularities and assemblages.

KW - compositionism

KW - cosmogram

KW - cosmology

KW - Critical zone

KW - curation

KW - exhibition

KW - museum

KW - nature-culture dualism

KW - thought exhibition

KW - thought experiment

KW - Media and communication studies

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=105012140462&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.47982/spool.2025.2.01

DO - 10.47982/spool.2025.2.01

M3 - Journal articles

AN - SCOPUS:105012140462

VL - 12

SP - 7

EP - 18

JO - Spool

JF - Spool

SN - 2215-0897

IS - 2

ER -