Cultivating contact zones: art, climate, and the planetary future

Mapping Elemental Flows 

‘Post-Carbon’ is an interdisciplinary series, initiated by curator Yixuan Cai, which investigates carbon as a cross‑media substance entangled with energy transition, technological advancement, and climate change. The inaugural edition, ‘Post‑Carbon: Carbon as Energy, Life Substance, and Currency’,  traced carbon’s material and symbolic circulations – from photosynthetic cycles and fossil‑fuel extraction to carbon‑credit economies – through artistic research, field expeditions, film screening and dialogues across ecology, material science, and social practice. 

Building on this, ‘Post‑Carbon 2.0’ turns toward the political economy of light and heat. Sunlight is framed as both primordial life‑giver and a contested energy carrier, through dialogues spanning scientists specialised in man-made sun technology, photovoltaic investors, and visual artists examining the role of light as both energy and image. Heat, in turn, is investigated as a medium of social control and ecological governance, bringing together AI researchers, architects, artists and sci-fi writers to discuss the aesthetics of ecological burning, the heat footprints of AI, the lived realities of marginalised communities and the rhetorical weight of entropy in literature. 

Structured as three sessions of forums, screenings, and field studies, the project unfolds as: 
1. Inner Radiance: The Black Gold Age of Silicon, Carbon, and Lithium. Co-hosted by Fotografiska, Shanghai. 
2. The Politics of Heat: Heatwaves, Code and the Future of Southern Cities. Co-hosted by Times Museum, Guangzhou.
3. The Materiality of Sun: The Infrastructure of Energy Mythology. The Materiality of Sun: The Infrastructure of Energy Mythology. Co-hosted by 798CUBE, Beijing.

The Geopolitics of Resources 

The project cultivates a transdisciplinary methodology operating through: 

• Media Philosophy – treating elements like carbon, silicon, and light as active, informational media rather than passive resources. 
• Scalar Thinking  – shifting perspective from microscopic/geological (carbon atoms) to planetary (atmospheric currents), and from embodied sensation (heat on skin) to geopolitical conflict  (resource wars). 
• Site Specific & Geopolitical Storytelling  – connecting localities such as Chile’s Atacama lithium mines and  China’s Huainan solar farms to reveal the localized impacts of global energy transitions. 
• Collaborative Platforms  – creating ‘contact zones’ where artists, scientists, theorists, and local communities can co-produce knowledge.  

The project mounts a multifaceted critique: it demystifies ‘green’ capital by tracing substances from mines and infrastructure to urban life and visual culture; frames thermal governance as biopolitics,  exposing heat as a class signifier, a computational by‑product, and an  unevenly distributed burden between Global North and South; and challenges extractive worldviews by treating carbon, sunlight, and heat as agential ‘actants.’ 

Knowledge Co-Production 

Ultimately, it moves beyond diagnosis toward proposition – crafting new narratives and sensibilities at the art-science-philosophy nexus to foster subjectivities capable of imagining post-extractive futures. This perceptual shift fundamentally challenges the cognitive frameworks that uphold current power. 

Who Owns Nature? is a three-chapter, research-based exhibition series developed at MACA, unfolding through Multispecies Clouds, Elemental Constellations, and Gaia Should Be Safe. Conceived as a long-term inquiry rather than a single exhibition, the project brings together artists, scholars, and cultural practitioners from different geographies, including a strong Swiss presence. Five Swiss artists and researchers (Uriel Orlow, Pamela Rosenkranz, Julian Charrière, Ursula Biemann, Chloé Delarue) contribute methodological rigor drawn from fields such as environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and experimental ethnography, enriching the project’s emphasis on transdisciplinary collaboration and critical ecological thought. 

Collectively, the series maps a shift from so-called ‘natural’ resources – soil, water, sunlight, microbial life – toward highly mediated technological systems such as infrastructure networks, data centers, mineral extraction, and geoengineering. Rather than presenting this transition as linear progress, the exhibitions reveal it as an entangled process in which nature is neither external nor passive. Multispecies Clouds foregrounds biological and informational networks, where life circulates through material and data flows. Elemental Constellations moves to the elemental scale, tracing how water, fire, land, and minerals become both poetic agents and extractive commodities. Gaia Should Be Safe expands this logic to planetary infrastructure, where dams, cables, solar fields, and climate systems operate as a cybernetic Earth. 

Across these chapters, shared methods emerge: multispecies ethnography, material research, speculative storytelling, and collaborative knowledge production between art and science. Artists operate as translators and mediators, working with scientific data, local knowledge, and non-human agencies to construct alternative cosmologies and counter-narratives. 

By reframing nature as a co-produced, multi-agent system, the series challenges dominant power structures that govern resource extraction and thermal management. It questions who controls energy, minerals, and climate, and exposes how colonial, extractivist, and technocratic logics continue to shape planetary governance. Ultimately, Who Owns Nature? proposes a non-linear cosmology – one that insists on responsibility, reciprocity, and new forms of ecological justice in the Anthropocene. 

‘A:Practice’ is a cooperative research and process-led initiative developed by The Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative (FATC), South Africa, and KlimaKontor Basel, Switzerland.   

The project grew out of a 2022 Pro Helvetia funded residency, where Swiss creative climate leader Barbara Ellenberger collaborated with PJ Sabbagha and FATC in rural Mpumalanga, South Africa. Together, they began shaping the emergent practices FATC had been prototyping for years in response to environmental degradation, climate change, and pandemics. 

From residency to framework 

During the residency, the partners explored how diverse fields – dance-theatre, agro-ecology, soil science, climate science, and indigenous knowledge systems – could intersect to form a practical framework for climate-positive resilience. This became ‘A:Practice’, designed to help cultural organisations and communities rethink and transform their ecological role. 

Their motivation stemmed from what they describe as a ‘generalised global need for new thinking in the face of escalating climate collapse, and new ways of tackling food production at a local level to break the reliance on industrialised agriculture.’ 

Expanding the vision 

In 2024, the project received a Synergies grant from Pro Helvetia, enabling the team to deepen their research and refine the methodology. Out of this work emerged the ‘A:Practice Matrix of Action’ – a tool to guide ecological decision-making for cultural organisations. 

The Matrix provides orientation, enables immediate action, and allows for the simultaneous implementation of various sustainability concepts. The partners describe the Matrix as offering ‘a holistic perspective on the global ecological situation and to help us consistently and continuously move from an ego-centric to an eco-centric way of life.’ 

It is structured around four intersecting fields of action, asking how we can: 

• Reconnect, rediscover, relearn? 

• Bend, boycott, break off? 

• Rethink, reclaim, reimagine? 

• Contribute, support, nurture? 

A framework for transformation 

Barbara Ellenberger describes ‘A:Practice’ as ‘an approach that views organisations as evolving processes and provides them with the “A-Practice Story” and “Matrix of Action” as resources to radically contribute to the ongoing creation of a home for every being.’ 

The framework is deliberately fluid, adaptable to the specific needs of each institution, and designed to foster exchange of experience and resources across organisations. 

The partners call this methodology a ‘re-worlding practice’, suggesting that ecological transformation can be achieved through manageable subprocesses that gradually build an integral institutional attitude toward an ecological future –grounded in common sense. 

Sharing and showcasing 

In March 2025, the partners hosted an ‘A:Practice’ mini-conference during the My Body My Space Public Arts Festival in Entokozweni, Mpumalanga. The event presented the methodology, the ‘Matrix of Action’, and new creative outputs developed through the lens of ‘A:Practice’. 

Seeking the coexistence and interaction among different perspectives on climate issues, the project ‘Microstories of the Cimate’ brought together researchers from two regions of the Brazilian Amazon – Evellyn Antonieta and Luzia Camila – and the Swiss writer Jean Baptiste Gaillard in an online literary residency. 

During their encounters (from May to August 2024), the participants were mediated by members of Brazilian Instituto Comum (that led the project) and explored how to connect experiences from diverse contexts. In the end, their ways of narrating the climate, viewed from specific regional perspectives, were woven together and published on an e-book, released in late 2025. The idea was to present and connect various narratives emerging from the micro-scale consequences of the climate crisis. 

Through experimental methodologies that integrated natural and social sciences with other knowledge systems and technologies, the programme investigated those viewpoints, grounded in the studied contexts. 

Evellyn Antonieta’s research documents climate and environmental changes as experienced by fishers in the Ribeirinho community of Rosa Mística in Manacapuru, Amazonas. ‘Climate events have had a significant impact on fishering and the lives of these communities,’ she explains in her text. ‘These fluctuations not only hinder fishing activity but also compromise the food security of riverside populations. (…) The resilience of these populations is continually tested, and adaptation to new climate and economic realities become increasingly urgent.’ 

The study of Luzia Camila, on the other hand, investigates the effects of agribusiness on the bodies and identities of the Black population in Quilombo do América, Bragança, Pará. As she writes: ‘Many studies point to the importance of traditional communities in land management as an example of experiences that can help us understand resistance to harmful cultivation and consumption techniques that are driving climate change. However, what we observe is that these experiences are being threatened by the advancement of these frontiers – of knowledge, economics, territory and politics – which put pressure on traditional communities, forcing them to assimilate to the pace and practices of the agricultural industry or generating rural exodus.’ 

Finally, writer Baptiste Gaillard engaged with the field materials of the Amazonian researchers and with the developments of their investigations, fostering mutual exchange among the three projects in different parts of the world. 

‘A change should not be confused with a rupture. It is a slow, global, and imperceptible force,’ Gaillard writes. ‘Perhaps an immediate and striking image is not possible, and perhaps, on the contrary, everything will play out in a kind of slow infiltration of ideas, imperceptible as this change is itself “imperceptible”. Quotation marks seem necessary, as the effects of this change are indeed very real and tragic for many people around the world, and perhaps there is again something like a discrepancy here: between what we experience here or there, between different experiences of change, between what we experience and what we believe we experience.’