ZOOPOLIS 

Fahim Amir & Alicia Agustín, Faiza Ahmad Khan & Hanna Rullmann, Alex Bailey & Krõõt Juurak, Theo Deutinger & Shelia Jap & Charlotte Kaulen & Pia Prantl & Nikolas Susanto, Animali Domestici, Finn Rabbitt Dove, Ant Farm, Kolbeinn Hugi, Thomas E. Hauck & Mark Frohn & Zoë McPherson, Daniela Kinateder, Ann Sophie Lindström, Maissa Maatouk, Modern Temperament/Oliver Klimpel & Till Sperrle, Daniel Poller, Yan Wang Preston, Club Real, Sunaura Taylor, Urban Fauna Lab and young architecture researchers from the Institute for Design studio 2, Gina Naessens, Fabian Quiring, Antonia Thanner, Louisa Wallner
Curated by Marion von Osten*, Christian Hiller, Alexandra Nehmer, Anh-Linh Ngo und Peter Spillmann in collaboration with Felix Hofmann, Ivana Marjanović, Birgit Brauner and Karl-Heinz Machat

This exhibition is the second part of the international project Cohabitation initiated by ARCH+ and funded by Austrian endowment funds for culture. Around the world, international partners conducted local research projects, case studies and design experiments.

*Marion von Osten is one of the initators of the project. She passed away in November 2020. This project is dedicated to her.


Cities have never belonged only to humans; animals have always been city dwellers, too. Parks, cemeteries, wastelands, overgrown ruins, building sites, and the city’s multilayered architecture itself offer good living conditions for many species. Currently, the migration of animals to cities is increasing worldwide. One of the reasons is that the food supply in cities is often better than in rural areas dominated by the monocultures of the agricultural industry. At the same time, ongoing processes of urbanization since the beginning of the modern era have led to the massive consumption of natural resources and extensive land take, contributing significantly to climate change and driving plants and animals to extinction. In the search for ways out of the ecological crisis, confronting the central yet ambivalent role of cities is imperative.

Although the ecology movement initiated a rethinking in architecture and urban planning in the 1970s, the decisive step to conceive of urban space also as a habitat for other species is still pending. It is time to recognize non-human species as urban agents and to develop new approaches that integrate them into design practice and spatial production. In addition to urban questions, Cohabitation also addresses urgent political issues. The plundering of nature leads to global chains of exploitation and injustice among animals and humans alike. Rethinking human-animal relations therefore also means taking class and gender relations as well as racism into account. Only then can we reimagine how to live together in solidarity in future urban societies.

ANTROPHOCITY

At the end of the 19th century, the hygiene discourse and housing reforms put an end to the close urban relationship between working people and animals. The modernist spatial separation of functions concealed existing relations of dependency and exploitation between humans and animals, with factory farms and slaughterhouses supplying the exploding urban population relocated to the periphery. The development of the bourgeois family, with its practice of keeping pets, led to a hierarchy that persists to this day: from the cherished pet, to the farm animal as a commodity, to the wild animal as a representative of untamed nature. The urban wild animal, however, fell through the cracks and was even considered “degenerate” by some. Nevertheless, even pets have an agency that goes far beyond their human-assigned role. To reimagine the city therefore means to overcome its anthropocentric assumptions.

ECOCITY

The environmental movement developed alternative approaches which renegotiated the opposition between city and nature. The field of urban ecology, which started to emerge in the 1960s/70s, advocated recognizing a new category of urban nature. However, as human insight into the functioning of ecological systems grew, so did the desire to control them. This vision of artificially created environments and controllable ecosystems continues to shape our technical approach to solving the climate crisis. Furthermore, the instrumentalization and capitalization of nature has, since the beginning of colonialism, also served to exercise power over people marked as “other”. One current example is the appropriation of nature conservation by right-wing political actors, who pit the lives of animals against those of racialized people. A truly ecological city must therefore tackle (interspecies) power relations instead of merely greenwashing existing hierarchies.

ZOOPOLIS

In recent decades, theorists such as Donna Haraway and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing have fostered a new awareness that humans have only been able to evolve through reciprocal relationships with other species. In order to truly acknowledge this kinship, we need new political models that no longer place humans above all else, but include the needs of other living beings and enable their participation in society. So far, there has been little reflection and even less practical testing of what this might mean for urban space. The recognition of non-human living beings as agents who actively shape the city can reveal new possibilities for designing an environment that transcends mere exploitation, speculation, and utilitarian thinking: an interspecies space that reflects the interdependence of humans, animals, and plants and that could lead to an expanded understanding of society and more livable cities for all.

EVENTS DURING THE EXHIBITION

OPENING
03.06.2022, 19:00
ZOOPOLIS COHABITATION PART II:
A MANIFESTO FOR THE SOLIDARITY OF ANIMALS
AND HUMANS IN URBAN SPACE


CURATORS TALK
04.06.22, 12:00 
COHABITATION PART II:
A MANIFESTO FOR THE SOLIDARITY OF ANIMALS
AND HUMANS IN URBAN SPACE
with Peter Spillmann, Felix Hofmann und Ivana Marjanovic 

READING
10.06.2022, 17:00
KARIN HARRASSER AT KUNSTRAUM INNSBRUCK
in Cooperation with Department of Philosophy, University Innsbruck


BOOKPRESENTATION & READING
02.08.20222, 18:00
SCHWEIN UND ZEIT
with Fahim Amir 

GUIDED TOUR
12.08.2022, 15:00
ENGLISCH
with Ivana Marjanovic

GUIDED TOUR
17.08.2022, 17:00
FOR MEMBERS 
with Peter Spillmann