The Imaginarium: A Theater for Constructed Ecologies at Examples to Follow 03.09.2010

by Studio Lukas Feireiss and Tomorrow's Thoughts Today with Luis Berríos-Negrón

As a living “wunderkammer“ and alchemists’ den, 'The Imaginarium’ acts as a discursive exhibit and performative platform suspended within the landscape of the main exhibition. ‘The Imaginarium’ is devoted to the prescient subject of ecological change and adaptations caused by artificial interventions into existing ecosystems. It catalogues a world in which the sun is setting on our idealistic and preservationist views of the natural world. The slow burn of evolutionary change, its endless generations, duplicating and multiplying with gradual mutation and variation is coming to an end. We now design the natural world as if it were the built landscapes of our cities.  We sculpt and engineer designer ecologies while organizations remake the earth's surface at a scale previously unimaginable. Corporations, as native animals of the globalized world, give form to reclaimed islands, instant cities and simulated environments. Against this backdrop, ‘The Imaginarium’ aims to reflect upon the major contemporary processes that evoke, drive and control the changes and challenges we are facing today, all in order to project a creative archaeology of thoughts and inspirations.

‘The Imaginarium’ is curated as an unnatural history museum of archaeological fragments, botantical samples, exhibits, evidence and curiosities contributed to the exhibition by leading figures from the world of architecture, art and science. Archived in the accompanying Catalogue of Speculative Specimens we see this jump in the fossil record, an evolutionary leap, as the interbreeding of biology and technology gives birth to a strange new nature. Here we gaze out across the near future population of our augmented wilderness. We lie in wait, where the wild things are, as these early specimens breed and multiply, to generate the new cities of a day soon to come.

'The Imaginarium’ is developed as a curatorial collaboration between Berlin-based Studio Lukas Feireiss and London-based Tomorrow‘s Thoughts Today, with Puerto Rican artist Luis Berríos-Negrón, using The Turtle Three mobile curatorial unit.

fotos by Luis Berríos-Negrón