This time last year I had just recently returned from New York and the Guggenheim Museum was one of the places I visited.Currently at the museum, but not available for auyone to see is a brand new exhibition curated by Rem Koolhaas. It fills the museum and was only open for a couple of weeks before the museum had to be closed. I read about the exhibition here, which offers to give new perspectives on the rural.
Here's a description of the concept:
In June of 2014, the UN released World Urbanization Prospects, a report that announced that half of all humankind now lived in cities, and stated that “managing urban areas has become one of the most important development challenges of the twenty-first century.” This heralded a global focus on sustainable urbanization that ignored the other half of the world’s population living in rural conditions—neglecting not just their challenges but also exciting and innovative solutions to modernity.
This exhibition is an attempt at rectification, and its content is drawn from a large consortium of collaborators representing diverse global geographies and a broad range of expertise. A unique exhibition for the Guggenheim Museum, Countryside, The Future contests the assumption that ever-increasing urbanization is inevitable, exploring radical changes in the rural, remote, and wild territories collectively identified here as “countryside,” or the 98% of the Earth’s surface not occupied by cities.
A central thesis of the exhibition is that our current form of urban life has necessitated the organization, abstraction, and automation of the countryside at an unprecedented scale. Data storage, fulfillment centers, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, robotic automation, economic innovation, worker migration, and the private purchase of land for ecological preservation are in many cases more actively explored and experimented with in the countryside than the city.
The impact of global warming on specific countryside conditions underlies much of the show. In Siberia, the thawing of permafrost is dramatically transforming the landscape and releasing increasing amounts of methane with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Here's an introduction to the exhibition:
And an image of the exhibition before it had to close:
Image source: https://www.guggenheim.org/video/see-countryside-the-future-at-the-guggenheim
I have the catalogue, which arrived last week. It's a tremendous little book with some excellent chapters, particular the one on permafrost thawing.
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