Deborah Schamoni

Haliti explores which animals might emerge in a post-human age. The creature moves through the space with grace and menace. Its ambiguous skeleton – composed of bones from various animals – reinforces the question posed by its title: “Whose Bones?” Haliti’s sculpture is an imaginary hybrid that combines contradictions. The artist herself describes the creature as a futuristic chimera that fuses the domestic with the dangerous, the high with the low, the predator with the prey. Its white 3D printed coating, reminiscent of snow, hints at a dystopian scenario – suggesting how a hybrid creature might appear after a prolonged snowfall, a possible consequence of climate change on a post-human planet.  

Early utopias were spatial utopias: Somewhere, on a distant island or an unreachable star, life would be much better, happier and longer. With the Enlightenment, the spatial utopia was transformed into a temporal utopia: if we continue to develop intellectually and technologically, we will soon have created a better, happier and perhaps even immortal world. With the genocide perpetrated by the National Socialists in the twentieth century, the utopian power of thought initially disappeared. But for the twenty-first century, Bruno Latour noted that ‘our idea of the future […] has switched from a temporal to a spatial variant’: ‘In all notions of progress, the future existed without a locus. Today, every projection into time is reeled in by the simple fact that the space has to be defined in which we will have a future’.

The most spectacular spatial utopias aim to create new living space outside the Earth, in space stations or on planets such as Mars or Venus. But this dream of a new life is very expensive and will be reserved to few people in the foreseeable future. The final hiking station of the Triennial is therefore devoted to alternative visions of future habitats on earth. Concepts like cohabitation and equality, empathy and care, emphasise the struggle taking place for new collective narratives which could describe a possible transformation. The ‘economic utopias’ of the industrial age are to give way to a ‘utopia of ecology’, where nature is no longer solely a resource. The exhibition thus presents and discusses approaches proposing a new understanding of nature, not in the sense of naturalising humans or anthropomorphising nature – but in the spirit of a communion of survival between equals.

Curated by Claudia Emmert and Ina Neddermeyer

Text: “Future Habitats” by Fellbach Triennale
Photo: Peter D. Hartung