Architectural Theory Review, World of Matter

The relationship of human beings to the earth is increasingly experienced as being in a state of crisis. In many places, the neoliberal economy’s incessant hunger for resource exploitation has led to trails of destruction and violent confrontation. More and more, the growing magnitude of these operations is giving rise to resistant formations that are not only oriented toward the prevention of specific extraction projects, but are calling for a fundamental overhaul of our perception of the earth as a passive deposit of supplies. The collaborative art project World of Matter responds to this call for a more ecological world-view through a collection of visual material on resource matters, arguing that any discursive shift necessitates and depends upon a different perspective on human–earth relations—a new mode of thinking is bound up in engaging a new imaginary of the world.

Architecture plays a decisive role in the acceleration of resource exploitation. The established truth of contemporary economic policies rests heavily on the notion of expanding wealth by securing compound growth. As evidenced by the expansionist and imperial politics of our modern era, accessing ever-new supplies of resources then becomes the key to holding power. Yet, the supply of resources is not simply a question of transferring material goods from one place to another. Supply chains generate their own economic dynamics in which the rationale for resource exploitation begins to rest less on substantiated necessities than on the logics of their own speculative markets.

Peter Mörtenböck,Helge Mooshammer,Paulo Tavares, Frauke Huber,Uwe H. Martin & Ursula Biemann