Counter Ecologies

From September 2023 to January 2024, the Museum of Modern Art presented Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism, the first comprehensive survey of environmental architecture at a major museum. The show, which focuses most closely on the 1960s and 1970s, documents a time when the abstract models of ecology were thought to offer an apolitical Archimedian point from which to steer the planet to a healthier state. Contrasting this supposed view from nowhere, Counter Ecologies digs deeper into the cultural contexts behind the different ecological visions on offer in the exhibition in order to foreground the always-political dimension of any environmental project. In claiming to speak for the Earth, this issue of Art Papers asks, whose voices have been foregrounded and whose silenced? What are the counter ecologies that run against the mainstream dictates of environmental discourse? Collectively edited by the Ambasz Institute, Counter Ecologies presents the many conflicting political projects launched under the sign of the ecological. 

A collaboration with Carson Chan, Dewi Tan, Eva Lavranou, Sarah Higgins, and Noah Reyes. Designed by Benjamin Critton.