#4 The Dark Abyss of Time

The overarching exhibition of Anthropocene Observatory by Armin Linke, Territorial Agency (John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog), and Anselm Franke is dedicated to the analysis of spatial orders and political institutions in the history of planning, modeling, and control in the Anthropocene, and studies the relationship between new global planning scenarios in the age of climate change to politics, economics, and property relations.

Are there old and new notorious blind spots in the scenarios of planning and control? The contested history of geology - as a science of planetary history - has developed alongside the material and social spaces of modernity. Each form of political and territorial organisation - the city-state, colonial empires, nations, the international order - has been linked to different natural resources and maintained different imaginaries of geological time. Anthropocene Observatory: #4 THE DARK ABYSS OF TIME explores how the exit from the Holocene is rapidly intensifying the semi-stable forms that have bound human cohabitation to its material spaces. It enquires into the forms of contemporary life and the spaces it is generating, cutting through established bonds, opening up new connections between science and politics, moulding control structures and shaping new landscapes and territories.

The destabilising conditions entailed by the new geological epoch reverberate across polities, institutions, law, international organisations, infrastructures, war, land, practices of scientific investigation and practices of government, the sea, cities, markets and planning institutions. They reshape human spaces as well as their material counterparts, they form a new mode of operation, where non-human and human agencies interact in unprecedented ways.

The exhibition articulates these emerging spaces through video installations, documents, interviews, large scale photography and remote sensing analysis. It extends and consolidates the archives of Anthropocene Observatory assembled over the last two years.

Anthropocene Observatory, a project by Armin Linke, Territorial Agency (John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog), and Anselm Franke

In the framework of: