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Paper short abstract

This paper explores Latour and Weibel's “thought exhibitions,” held at the ZKM in Germany, from an ethico-onto-epistemo-logical perspective. It investigates how its hybrid exhibits, created by fusing scientific evidence and art, engaged the public in the cosmopolitics of the New Climate Regime.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, cultural institutions in many parts of the world have dedicated themselves to exploring matters of global concern like climate change through art and technoscience, including the ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Here, between 2002 and 2020, STS scholar Bruno Latour and artist/curator Peter Weibel organised four “thought exhibitions.” Through these spatio-aesthetic experiments, they sought to challenge the foundations of European Modernity and dualisms underpinning it (e.g. nature/culture, object/subject, human/non-human, etc.). Using the museum space as a test-bed for complex ideas, these exhibitions aimed to encourage visitors to contemplate new ways of understanding, inhabiting, and acting within a planet that appeared no longer inert, stable, and a passive background to human activity, but had become an active, reactive agent in human history. How to live under what Latour (2017) called the “New Climate Regime” was explored here through hybrid objects created through artist/scientist collaborations. This paper explores Latour and Weibel’s “thought exhibitions” and some of the artworks created, fusing evidence and aesthetic materials through the lens of Barad’s (2007) ethico-onto-epistemo-logical perspective, which holds that ethics, knowing, and being are closely intertwined in world-making (p. 203). This allows us to ask: what kind of world-making did these “thought exhibitions” attempt? What kind of knowledge-claims did their hybrid artworks support? And finally, how did these thought exhibitions figure in Latour’s endeavour to create a Dingpolitik aimed at composing a better common world?