Eco-Visionaries: a very beautiful emergency

The problem with impending climate catastrophe is, frankly, that it’s just such a downer. Almost everything we do, from flying and eating meat to streaming a movie and wearing clothes, is destroying the systems that support us. We are bombarded with statistics about a constantly evolving constellation of new behaviours to feel guilty about.

The question that the new Eco-Visionaries show at London’s Royal Academy seeks to ask is whether there might be a more effective way of addressing that anxiety through art, architecture and design rather than statistics and grim projections of annihilation. The consensus is that we need narrative — good stories to latch on to which give us the hope we need to make a change rather than the cloud of inevitable disaster convincing us there’s nothing we can do.

In this show we are greeted by a globe rotating in a filthy tank of water, slowly gathering dirt until it will be completely obscured. It isn’t the most hopeful of beginnings.

As with so many exhibitions that try to address the environmental and social impact of climate change and potential solutions to it, the exhibits demand a lot of reading and background. From ravenous and eco-system-upending fish to patterns of air pollution via melting glaciers, there are plenty of seductive images which turn out to contain miserable messages about environmental degradation. Where it works is in the mix of media and disciplines, the placing of sci-fi speculative design beside AI-generated film, conceptual art and steampunk, Mad Max futurism.

The best thing here is Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s mesmeric animation of the last male northern white rhinoceros, Sudan, which died last year. The beast is brought back to life using AI-generated images and sound; it walks around a white room and occasionally disintegrates into a pixelated, blocky mass of rhino skin-clad cubes. It’s a melancholic and unsettling installation which dominates the show. Its success is its legibility. Here is a creature that was very real and which we have lost, resurrected through technology (some of which comes from Google’s big brains at Deep Mind), present in the Academy but imprisoned in the digital.

Olafur Eliasson’s documenting of disappearing glaciers is now very familiar, but his wall of snaps of the last remnants of ice from once-mighty glaciers is still a moving record of loss. Dunne & Raby’s eerie-looking green face masks with hanging trumpets for ingestion, designed for a future in which humanity might need to absorb nutrition in new ways, are profoundly weird and striking.

Design studio Unknown Fields’ investigations into the landscapes of lithium and water extraction — both suggested as alternatives to fossil fuels — are presented using seductively beautiful images and revealing deeply troubling impacts for local populations. I couldn’t see much point in Virgil Abloh’s wonky bronze chair which is supposed to represent rising sea levels but you can see why a big brand name from the world of fashion like Abloh might have been included in a show about a difficult subject attempting to appeal to a broader audience.

The danger in exhibitions such as this is the aestheticisation of crisis. It’s something that is very evident in the Chicago Architecture Biennial and has been a recurring paradox in the cultural communication of climate catastrophe. You need to make a show to raise awareness engaging and attractive but, in doing so, you undermine the extent of the impending disaster precisely through making it engaging and attractive. The problem of climate change and our contributions to it is undoubtedly an issue for design — the greatest, in fact, that there has ever been. Might we be able to create a better system, tools less harmful and more effective? Can we replace fossil fuels, meat, extractive industries, waste and the rest? These are cultural concerns.

If concrete were a country, it would come in third, behind the US and China, in terms of its carbon emissions

It is ironic that the field seemingly most incapable of coming to terms with these issues should be architecture, the one profession that might be able to conceive of the bigger, planetary picture and new ways of living on an appropriately global scale. The evidence here is depressing. A few fragments from 1970s eco-utopians Ant Farm and some happy-looking retro-hippyish, off-world, New-Age nonsense suggest that architects have struggled to redefine the world and escape their narrowly defined measures of success. I recently came across the striking statistic that if concrete were a country, it would come in third, behind the US and China, in terms of its carbon emissions. In other words, concrete construction accounts for eight per cent of global emissions. Architects are central to the crisis but almost everything they do undermines progress and the more of it they do, the more successful they become, the worse they get.

This is in parts a stimulating and intriguing show which ends with a hypnotic display of jellyfish — the one genus that seems to be thriving on climate change. But it underplays design’s complicity in the very problem it seeks to illuminate. It’s refreshing to see rhino and jellyfish replace polar bears and pandas in the narrative of collapse, but are we just creating new modes of branding when the problems demand something so much more visionary?

To February 23, royalacademy.org.uk