Contemporânea

Territorial Agency: To address that, we need to consider that there are two shifts: first, we are in a moment when we have a new understanding of what we mean by “the Earth”; second, at the same time as we are developing a new understanding of the Earth, we are more and more alert to the deep transformations we are causing. We think that this entails a new spatial turn.

The first shift is connected to the scientific revolution, wherein Galileo Galilei proved that the Earth is a small planet orbiting the sun, indicating that our home is very small in comparison to the cosmos. The shape of that scientific revolution was felt largely theoretically—it didn’t really matter on a day-to-day basis.

Today, the discovery of Gaia, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis's hypothesis that life regulates the Earth, is probably even more radical: the discovery that we are part of an entity that is alive.^[4] We are not just among other living beings but part of an entity that is alive.

This coincides with a second shift, the complex realisation of the transformation of life by us. This is the notion of the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch where all the parameters of the long climatic stable Earth of the Holocene have been modified.

So it’s a double shift, a double condition. Firstly, there is a reorientation towards life; and secondly, we’re discovering the conditions of transformation of the planet by life and the impact that life has on the regulation of its own environment. We realise that some humans have a knock-on effect to that very complex system of life regulation—and this is the discovery of what we call the Anthropocene. We’re discovering and, at the same time, changing the conditions on Earth to a level that has completely transformed the Earth and pushed its dynamics towards a trajectory that could entail end of life. And this is the real difficulty which perhaps resonates with people’s notion of crisis and chaos.

There’s also another element to our answer, which has to do with the spatial term. With this, we consider ourselves to be not a small entity in a vast cosmos but within Gaia—and to be inside is a condition that is much more interesting. This is where the catastrophism is countered with the idea of action, of agency: agency within this very surprising, and self-regulating Earth, within a complex set of relations, circularities, and metabolisms. It means that we can co-organise cohabitation in a different way; we can, together with other entities, shape what it means to be together.

We are in a very threatening and also exciting moment, because to “be within” or “to live with” are concepts that are contrary to the history of modernity. Moderns would see these changes as if from the outside, thus implementing plans or going from A to B without ever going back, being implicated in the consequences of plans, and reconsidering really being inside.

TA: There is so much work to do. That’s what we always say. The question is to understand that we act with, not on. This is a reference to Andy Pickering’s work on cybernetics.^[5] The entire notion of agency is connected not only to the human capacity to acquire power but to the understanding that comes from our dear friend Bruno Latour: that agency is a condition through which the associations, the amalgams, and the complex networks that make up the world are distributed and articulated.^[6] Agency is what keeps things together.

TA: The Anthropocene Observatory was an amazing opportunity, above all because it allowed us to collaborate with Armin and Anselm, and to meet the people who put forward the idea of the Anthropocene. We interviewed Paul Crutzen and all the researchers of the Anthropocene Working Group, from geologists and other scientists to lawyers and anthropologists as well as activists, artists, and people on the ground like farmers, diplomats, politicians, scientists, and other practitioners. We followed them, asked questions and really got to know what they were up to—and that was an amazing initial insight.

In 2013, it was difficult to understand whether what the scientists, philosophers, and scholars from the humanities were observing was a change in what we would call the World-System, or simply a reinstatement of a notion of politics of Nature. The initial hypothesis was a glimpse into something happening, and it was very difficult to discern the notion of the Anthropocene as a new epoch of the Earth. Today, it is far clearer to everyone concerned that Paul Crutzen and Will Steffen's hypothesis of the great acceleration is one that is transitioning away from the long period of the Holocene. The Anthropocene has become a stable concept that is used with clarity throughout a number of disciplines, practices, cultures, and geographies.

At the same time, the Anthropocene has become a more contested hypothesis in both sciences and humanities, with opposition to it among scientists becoming clearly political—not in the sense of party politics but in terms of the implications of the Anthropocene within the complex agencies of science, with scientific groups and institutionalisation and formalisation processes becoming increasingly contrasting and juxtaposed. And this, of course, led to the contested dismissal of the formalisation of the Anthropocene last April [2024] as a constituent part of the geological time scale.

Personally, we have gone from observing the Anthropocene Working Group to becoming part of it, and helping to stabilise this concept in cultural and other fields. And this group is incredibly varied: it includes people from international law, historians, historians of science, people concerned with the relationship between artificial intelligence and so-called fake news. The entire relationship between the World-System and the Earth system has moved into a space that is far more fertile for discussion.

TA: That the city is heavy is nothing new. That the city is now a condition of planetary dimension is something new, however, and this goes back to your first question about the Earth. How heavy is a city? started a long time ago during the Anthropocene Observatory with a series of discussions with geologists, particularly Colin Waters, Mark Williams and Jan Zalasiewicz and others of the Anthropocene Working Group.

The idea was how to start characterising what the late Peter Haff called the technosphere.^[8] The technosphere is the novel dimension of the Earth. It’s the new component of the Earth that is an off-shoot of the biosphere. We have the lithosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere with water, the cryosphere with snow and ice, and the biosphere. Haff’s hypothesis is that this new component, the technosphere, is a diversion of biosphere processes whereby the uptake of energy, materials, and information is now operating at a new magnitude. The technosphere is composed of a network of the technological structures that keep humans alive, in the sense of what we eat, domesticated animals and plants, agriculture, plantation fisheries, plus all these structures that support those material fluxes and the energy behind them and industrial products. The hypothesis of the technosphere is that it is now a component of the Earth. For us the contemporary city is the technosphere.

The contemporary city is no longer what we tend to imagine the city to be like. The little components that we still name Lisbon, London, Reykjavik, Kuala Lumpur, etc. are individual components of a planetary structure—of a planetary paradigm, to use a geological term—of a magnitude comparable to that of the biosphere. It sucks up as much energy as net primary production—the amount of energy that is taken by the biosphere from the sun, which is then circulated in the form of trophic chains, or food-chains.

It is now of an unparalleled magnitude in terms of mass, energy, and information fluxes. It’s really strange to start thinking that our space, the city, the space of political action, of engagement with novelty, traditions, long-standing transformation of languages and literature, architecture, poetry, music, is now a component of a self-organising planetary system, just like the atmosphere. It is driven by dynamics completely out of our remit of control. This is where the question of How heavy is a city? starts. It’s a question moving towards the "planetary" and towards what it means to act in this space.

Lisbon is important for the project, because the question of understanding agency starts with the Lisbon earthquake. The question is whether we live in a world that is divided, like St Augustine would say, between the City of the Earth, the worldly city, and the City of God. Who is evil and who is good completely changed with the Lisbon earthquake. Was the tremor caused by wrath? What are the connections between providence and action? The question of agency and possibility of a good world transformed European culture into a project of  secularisation —starting, of course, with Voltaire, and the entire association of thinkers, philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, poets who tried to establish a secular dimension (a technological dimension) of the city. Today, we are in a similar situation, but what moves the stability of our cohabitation is no longer the tremor of the lithosphere, but technology. Technology, which rose as a major force of the project of a scientific, secular world, is causing or augmenting the crisis of the Anthropocene. It augments the fires; it’s the technosphere that is augmenting the level of the oceans; it’s the technosphere that is pushing birds and animals and plants towards the poles. It is also the technosphere that allows us to catch a glimpse of how we are cutting across all pre-existing living spaces.

So this is the first inversion of agency that the visitors of the Triennale will have to encounter: the inversion of what we used to think as an outside and an inside. Each one of the three exhibitions—Fluxes, Spectres, and Lighter—starts with this inversion of agency, and then we articulate the question of How heavy is a city? further with a multiplicity of further questions: Who measures? What does it mean to measure? What do measurements then do? Who owns measurement, and who can use measurement? Where do you stop measuring? How far do you go? Do you measure information? When do you measure? Do you measure in the morning or in the evening? Do you measure over centuries? What does it mean to have agency? What does it mean not to be able to shape your own environment? What does it mean to have produced enough concrete to cover the entire planet in a layer two centimetres thick? What does it mean to imagine that the cities, like volcanoes, constantly emit gases, move matter, and transform cohabitation?

All these questions come from the fact that we shape the Triennale as a coalition of thinkers, architects, philosophers, artists, and poets each contributing to addressing this question. What you will see in the Triennale is a number of questions further addressing the contemporary planetary dimension of the city—of what we used to call the city.

It’s really about a new imaginary for the city, and how to express that. If the city is in the ocean, if it’s in the atmosphere—if Lisbon is in the ocean, Lisbon is in the atmosphere—if it’s getting things from other places on the Earth, then it has a completely different imaginary from the typical image of the city map. So, it needs new images; and that’s what the Triennale will set forth.

TA: Only partially. We think that the idea of the human city as a black hole is interesting. In terms of energy, the city is a negative condition of the biosphere. The city is where we punch holes into the biosphere, as Mark Williams says, where we imagine spaces deprived of other lives. If people reading this interview would look around themselves, most probably they will see that in the spaces created by humans, there is very little space left for other species—for animals, for birds, for bacteria, for fungi—in spite of the fact that they proliferate and keep the entire Earth going.

At the same time, we are not trying to articulate something different from what is already being experienced by everyone—and the city is not simply a burden. To ask How heavy is a city? is also to incite a condition of responsibility towards the spaces that we shape and inhabit. The question of design, urbanism, and architecture is central in this. Architecture, seen as the relationship between inhabitation and the material condition that we shape, is the key dimension of the enquiry.

What does it mean to think of a project for the city whereby the city is not simply framed as an object that you can act upon, but as something you are inside of—along with others fluxes, other conditions? It’s a call for a democratisation of the notion of technology, a democratisation of the notion of action, of the responsibility of planning and making decisions that are impacting the lives of others. It’s a call for an urgency to transform the city. We cannot have cities designed for the Anthropocene as if we were in a stable world—we need much more feedback. We need adaptation and mitigation towards the upheavals of the Anthropocene.

We live in an industrialised world. We live in a world that’s dominated by technology, where technology is the main driver of transformation of the atmosphere, of the ocean, of the biosphere. To think that we cannot do anything, we believe, is morally problematic.

The question of How heavy is a city? is also a question of balancing: how do we balance ideas? Not to shy away from the violence that is implied in technology but, on the contrary, to face the violence of the technosphere. There’s no Utopia. There’s no outside. In that sense, we’ve had 500 years of Utopia of modernity—and it’s enough now. Now we have to come back to our senses. And this question of how to evaluate all of this is our small contribution to the effort of understanding that secularisation demands responsibility.