• Group Exhibition
  • Haus De Kulturen De Welt, Berlin, Germany
  • 2014

The Anthropocene Project

In their essay film MEDIUM EARTH (2013), The Otolith Group explores the earthquake endangered geology of California as well as the spatialized unconscious of capitalist modernism. Through pictures that appeal to the senses and the voice of a medium whose body is sensitive to seismic occurrences, the film listens to California's deserts, translates what the stones write, and decodes the calligraphy of the earth's crevices. The second part of the exhibition, WHO DOES THE EARTH THINK IT IS (2014), consists of redacted and scanned selections from the unofficial collection of unsolicited earthquake predictions sent by members of the public to the United States Geological Survey Pasadena Field Office at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Southern California, between 1993 and 2007. The Anthropocene Project With the traditional methods of knowledge acquisition the natural sciences on the one side and the humanities on the other, mankind has reached a limit. The indivisible concatenation of industrial metabolism, climate change, urbanisation, soil erosion and the extinction of species, as well as a new social (self)consciousness have shown: The rapid reformation of cause and effect, means and end, quality and quantity requires a new approach to the world which is not governed by postmodern discourse but material interconnections and processes from the accumulation of plastics into artificial islands in the ocean, to the particularity of a speck of dust on its way from the Sahara to the Brazilian rainforest. A new sense of amazement at the wonder of planet earth is required: What can we do, how can we know and to what extent are the two connected? With what means, methods and senses can we encounter the world of our own creation?