Artists: DISNOVATION.ORG (Maria Roszkowska, Nicolas Maigret, Baruch Gottlieb with Jerome Saint-Clair, Clémence Seurat, Julien Maudet, Nicolas Nova, Pauline Briand)
Exhibition title: The Long Shadow of the Upward Arrow. Post Growth Prototypes
Curated by: Raffael Dörig
Venue: Kunsthaus Langenthal, Langenthal, Switzerland
Date: February 2 – June 25, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Kunsthaus Langenthal
The upward arrow symbolizes the narrative of progress according to which economic growth and technological advancements solve the ecological problems these create. The exhibition explores and challenges this way of thinking as well as its lacunae, and it juxtaposes them with transformative post-growth practices and prototypes. The series of videos, installations, objects, and texts – new chapters being added regularly – was devised by the international collective DISNOVATION.ORG, who invited collaborators from various fields of arts and sciences. The exhibition marks the first comprehensive exhibition of this project in the German-speaking world, after previous chapters have been shown in France, the Netherlands, Belgium and the US among other countries.
The exhibition includes installations that help translate enormous issues to human scale and suggest alternative ways of thinking. One installation, for example, uses the cultivation of one square meter of wheat under completely artificial conditions to illustrate the vast range of services provided by ecosystems “for free”. Another juxtaposes the paradigmatic upward curve of economic growth with the hidden costs, the „shadow growth“ of pollution and destruction. The Post Growth Toolkit Game invites the audience to discuss key topics of the exhibition based on their personal experience. A growing library of video interviews with experts from various scientific disciplines complement these installations and are also accessible online.
This exhibition is an invitation to a collective and practical engagement with our shared future, explo-ring the notion of growth in its many facets and implications, and testing the limits of technology, politics, and our imagination. At Kunsthaus Langenthal, it is part of a series of exhibitions that critically examine narratives of progress and technology, such as „Raus aus dem digitalen Unbehagen“(2017, among others with DISNOVATION.ORG), „I am Flowers. I am Animals“ (2018) or „Home for Obso-lete Media“ (2021).
An exhibition by DISNOVATION.ORG [Maria Roszkowska, Nicolas Maigret, Baruch Gottlieb] with Jerome Saint-Clair, Clémence Seurat, Julien Maudet, Nicolas Nova, Pauline Briand. Curated by Raffael Dörig, director of Kunsthaus Langenthal.
„The past two centuries have seen unprecedented techno-industrial activity, powered by fossil fuel and an industrial, economic and scientific thinking linked to it. Enormous value is produced from the materiality of the planet, the expansion of which we call “growth”. But the story of growth has a deep shadow: the exploitation of the Earth and humans, of slavery, colonialism, and destruction. Now as the fossil fuel age wanes, the shadow darkens and spreads. Human beings emerged from the materi-ality of the planet symbiotic and symbiogenetic with the biosphere, but the transition to technological hyper-modernity has pushed the biosphere into crisis. How are we to understand our technological condition anew, and how can we cultivate the politics necessary to avert large-scale ecosystemic breakdown?“ DISNOVATION.ORG
Artist‘s bio
DISNOVATION.ORG is a research collective set up in Paris in 2012, whose core members include Maria Roszkowska (PL), Nicolas Maigret (FR), and Baruch Gottlieb (CA). They work at the inter-face between contemporary art, research, and hacking, and compose tailor-made teams for each investigation together with academics, activists, engineers, and designers. More specifically their recent artistic provocations seek to empower Post Growth imaginaries and practices by challenging the widespread faith that ‘economic growth’ and ‘technological fixes’ will solve the ecosystemic dis-ruptions they produced in the first place. They recently co-edited A Bestiary of the Anthropocene with Nicolas Nova, an atlas of anthropic hybrid creatures, and The Pirate Book, an anthology on media piracy.
DISNOVATION.ORG’s works have been exhibited, performed, published, and reviewed worldwide, including at the Centre Pompidou (Paris), transmediale (Berlin), the Museum of Art and Design (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), FILE (Sao Paulo), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Strelka Institute (Moscow), ISEA (Hong Kong), Elektra (Montreal), China Museum of Digital Arts (Beijing), and the Chaos Computer Congress (Hamburg). Their work has been featured in Forbes, Vice, Wired, Motherboard, Libération, Die Zeit, Arte TV, Next Nature, Hyperallergic, Le Temps, Neural.it, Digicult, Gizmodo, Seattle Weekly, torrentfreak.com, and Filmmaker Magazine among others.
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists
DISNOVATION.ORG, The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow. Post Growth prototypes, Exhibition views Kunsthaus Langenthal, 2023, Photo: Cedric Mussano, Courtesy of the artists