STRATUM: The Aesthetics of the Anthropocene An Exhibition to Catalyze. Environmental Criticism

Entering a museum always means entering a counter-world, a space for contemplation with unexpected inspirations. Nevertheless, countless museums opt for commercial blockbusters, with conventional curatorial scripts or, as in the case of the exhibition of contemporary art, with inflated concepts of banal or esoteric philosophical notions. In this discouraging landscape, university museums such as UNAM’s University Museum of Science and Art (MUCA, Spanish initials) stand out, a precinct that fosters productive dialogue between sciences and the arts. Throughout its more than six decades of existence, the MUCA has presented relevant exhibitions on the artistic avant-garde in Mexico and, in 2022, it fully complies with its mission by proclaiming the “Thematic Year of Geoaesthetics”.

Especially the STRATUM exhibition (from July 30^th to October 29^th, 2022), which takes advantage of the experimental spirit and openness to innovative projects that link the various modes of knowledge production between sciences, humanities, and the arts. 

One of the challenges humanity faces is the unsustainable and self-destructive management of the planet in its current era, the Anthropocene, when humans express themselves as a geological force. Confirming this diagnosis is the fact that currently technomass—human products such as cities, industries, and infrastructure—outweighs biomass on Earth (Zalasiewicz & Williams, 2021). It is these signs of environmental destruction that led the scientist Paul Crutzen (2002) to proclaim the Anthropocene, defined by several stages of human history, starting with the Neolithic Revolution (with the first human settlements), the Industrial Revolution (from the second half of the 18th Century and the excessive use of fossil energy), up to the so-called “Great Acceleration” from the 1950's on (with an exponential increase in consumption and in atmospheric, hydrographic and land degradation), visualized with the famous “hockey stick” graph (Mann et al., 1998). Although the definition of a geological era called the Anthropocene has not yet received official recognition by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which assumes that we still live in the Holocene, which began eleven thousand years ago, its discursive function as a concept for environmental critique is unquestionable (Latour, 2017).

A case both extreme and paradigmatic is the Valley of Mexico (Krieger, 2012), where one of the largest urban agglomerations in the world, Mexico City, and its extensions towards neighboring cities: Pachuca to the northeast, Toluca to the northwest, Cuernavaca to the south and Puebla to the southeast, are accumulated. This is the hyper-urbanized critical scenario that the Mexican-German artist Luis Carrera-Maul transfers to the huge hall of the MUCA. He expands his artistic installation over 19 hundred square meters with 35 tons of material, modeling the contours and volumes of the valley. In the work, the silhouette of the emblematic mountains, including the Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl volcanoes, are covered with ceramic waste garbage in a three-dimensional image that shows the abuse of a landscape with high biodiversity and geodiversity, turning it into a garbage dump, a space for urbanization and uncontrolled industrialization, which leads to accelerated processes of erosion and intoxication. The ceramic fragments from the Ánfora factory in Pachuca, randomly distributed in this artificial and artistic landscape, visually represent this erosion. The layers of ground ceramic mass that the artist applied throughout the installation are fractured and reminiscent of soils and lakes under drought conditions in numerous areas of Mexico and many other parts of the world, and also thematize the consequences of climate change.

Ceramics are soil products. Although due to their aciditythey cannot serve as a substrate, it is possible to grind the waste and reintegrate it into the production cycle. Such cycles and their environmental impact are the subjects of STRATUM. Beyond ceramics, Carrera-Maul integrated expanded polystyrene (also known as Styrofoam) into the work, a material with unfavorable characteristics, which decomposes biologically in slow processes, over several centuries. By chance, the artist found in a rural area of the State of Mexico several trays of this material, illegally dumped on wild meadows. During more than ten years of abandonment, native vegetation has grown between the boreholes. Carrera-Maul staged this striking image in his installation STRATUM: by watering them with a misting system, these plants continue to grow in the museum; it is an auto-poietic process that points to a possible posthuman future when we, Earth’s dominant species, become extinct and wild plants cover the ruins of hyper-urban civilization (Krieger, 2021a).

The integration of the vegetal element, as a green nucleus in this ecocritical installation revalues the free and wild growth of an ecosystem, as in the nearby Pedregal de San Ángel Ecological Reserve (REPSA, Spanish initials), a worldwide extraordinary space preserved by UNAM (Zambrano González et al., 2016; Lot & Cano Santana, 2009; Krieger 2021b). While most people still does not question the controlled ornamental vegetation of planters and parks, or even the greenwashing of real estate megaprojects (Zambrano, 2019), safeguarding and encouraging the development of wild nature is undoubtedly a challenge for environmental policies in the near future.

Visitors to the museum and online observers of two permanently active cameras (https://muca.unam.mx/stratum.html), are confronted with the beauty and power of nature in the midst of a desolate, littered landscape. For 14 weeks (end of July to end of October, 2022), the MUCA hall is a greenhouse that allows us to approach evolutionary auto-poiesis processes.

The contrast of the artistic simulation of the geoscape of the Valley of Mexico with the green, wild, metamorphic core generates a sensory and epistemic impact on the visitors.

From the entrance, a landscape in crisis is perceived, condensed in a mega work of art that invites us to reflect on the current conditions of the megacity of Mexico, with piles of concrete, asphalt, and garbage, a paradigmatic case of unsustainable development in times of the Anthropocene. In the attentive gaze of visitors, what Alexander von Humboldt (2019) called a “total impression” (Totaleindruck) of the geoscape emerged when he visited the Valley of Mexico more than two centuries ago. Humboldt was fascinated by the geoscapes in America, but he also detected and criticized the anthropogenic impact that the extremes of the megalopolitan landscape manifest today. The geomorphological identity of the Valley of Mexico, its volcanoes, hills, mountains, and ravines, is undergoing an accelerated process of erosion caused by the interventions of homo faber.

STRATUM debates this topic through the format of the work of art and thereby revives the visionary Humboldtian concept of linking scientific research with humanities and the arts. In Cosmos, his magnum opus, Humboldt (2004) explains that scientific measurements are essential, although insufficient to reach a complex understanding of landscapes, their potential, and their problems. The inclusion of landscape aesthetics stimulates different ways of comprehension (Singer, 2002), understanding aesthetics not as a normative definition of beauty, but in the Aristotelian sense, as sensory cognition. Every look at the STRATUM installation is an act of deep inquiry into the environmental problem. In this way, the museum serves as a laboratory, exhibiting a work of art as proof. This process of sensory cognition is distinct from traditional art formats, such as landscape painting of Humboldt’s time (Brownlee, et al. 2015), or sensationalist visual discourses in the press and Greenpeace campaigns. The installation is a contemporary art format, a subtle abstraction that requires contemplation and reflection.In short, STRATUM is a work that unfolds itself by walking along paths marked by wooden bases, with simple benches, and a discussion forum within the exhibition. The permanent change of perspectives of this artificial landscape reveals its diversity of spatial images. STRATUM is a metamorphic installation, the accumulated ceramic debris falls off, erodes and the green nucleus grows rapidly (in just one week of STRATUM, the plants grew about twenty-five centimeters). For this reason, the artist asked to call his work an “intervention” (as the subtitle indicates) and not an installation, although the latter term is the one that dominates contemporary art historiography.

As the subtitle specifies, STRATUM is a geoaesthetic intervention, based on a novel concept of aesthetic research developed at UNAM (Krieger, 2018). Geoaesthetics has its conceptual origin in Humboldt’s thought and takes up the “geological turn” proclaimed a decade ago (Ellsworth & Kruse, 2013). The conceptual postulate of this turn is the integration of humanities and arts in Earth research, especially during the Anthropocene (Davis & Turpin, 2015). It is pleasing to recall that since their disciplinary configurations in the 19th Century European university system, art history and geology share common methods and objectives: both are historical disciplines, both describe their object of study (a painting or a stone), classify it and deduce its values, its uses, and its meanings.

However, with the specialization of disciplines, communication between sciences and humanities decreased. This is STRATUM’s proposal, conceived as geoaesthetic research: to conceptualize and exhibit a work of art that catalyzes environmental thinking; to offer a stimulus for complex and critical reflection. Through the image, in this case, a spatial image, research schemes separated into “two cultures” are broken, as well as the discursive routines on the term of “sustainability”, already emptied of sense (Radkau, 2011). Artworkslike STRATUM catalyze transdisciplinary knowledge; they are products of research; in fact, STRATUM is also Carrera-Maul’s master’s degree thesis in Art Education at UNAM’s School of Arts and Design.

The curatorial concept is nurtured by a close collaboration between several UNAM’s academic entities: the Institute for Aesthetic Research, the Institutes of Geophysics and Biology, the Center for Complexity Sciences (C3), the REPSA, the University Program for Interdisciplinary Soil Studies (PUEIS, Spanish initials), the University Coordination for Sustainability (COUS, Spanish initials), and the Schools of Architecture, and Arts and Design, which represents an enormous feedback intensity within the university. Of course, due to the high degree of specialization, it is not a simple dialogue. Still, an interdisciplinary way of working requires the elimination of epistemic obstacles or, simply, prejudices, such as discrediting aesthetic research as something superficial or not scientific. Taking into account the great crossover tradition between arts and sciences in the work of Leonardo da Vinci, for example, explained by Art History, the options of complex understanding are outlined: the artwork reveals different faces of the pressing problem of unsustainable management in planet Earth.

With this art project, “UNAM responds” (I’m paraphrasing the suggestive title of a TV UNAM show where STRATUM was presented in July 26^th, 2022) to the ethical and ecological demands of our days; STRATUM is an unprecedented project in Mexico that produces knowledge with social and environmental utility and has been exhibited at the University Museum of Science and Art, in University City, an outstanding nucleus within the infinite megalopolis that spills into the Valley of Mexico. STRATUM takes advantage of the freedom of research and expression granted by UNAM to its members. In addition, it fulfills the mission of producing innovative and relevant knowledge for Mexican society. And last, it is integrated into international debates on the aesthetics of the Anthropocene, specifically with projects and academic and artistic collaborations with the universities of Regensburg, Tübingen, and Hamburg-Warburg Haus in Germany, Bern in Switzerland, Gothenburg in Sweden, and even with Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

The geoaesthetics of technomass layers is a topic of global relevance. STRATUM provides unexpected inspirations for such discussions. 

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