Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds.
Let’s take as a starting point that “the Earth is moving yet again.” It is shifting, unstable, reactive; it’s different one year, or minute, to the next. In an age of rising seas and mass extinctions, the point hardly needs proving.
The quote comes from the introduction to
Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, a tome-sized catalog published in 2020 to accompany an exhibition at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. The philosopher Bruno Latour and the artist/curator Peter Weibel are its organizer and editors. For them, and for a growing cadre of scientists and theorists, “critical zones” are a new framework for understanding the world not as a globe, nor exactly as a serene, self-healing Gaia, but as the thin, contested skin of the Earth on which we actually live: soil and rocks, air and water, plants and trees, animals, and all the marks of humanity physical ones, of course, but also art, pol