THE CHANGE IN PATTERNS
Part I: Water Mining
January 15, 2023, 11am–5pm
Barbara Marcel · Mario Asef · Hans Baumann · Felipe Castelblanco · President Jimmy Carter
Climate patterns have changed. We have entered an era of extraordinary conditions in which records are broken every year and every month. While this exhibition was taking place, flooding in California reached record levels and Europe experienced its warmest winter.
Water bodies are at the center of the project. Through them, mitigation and resilience acquire new meanings in the context of climate change. The program is not a romantic look at the past, but an artistic framework for producing knowledge across relationships among scientists, politicians, industry, Indigenous communities, and other social actors.
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Contemporary society is built upon the extraction of natural resources on a vast scale, and water plays a central role in those processes. Fracking and lithium production, among other industries, are forms of what may be described as water mining.
In Brandenburg, the Tesla factory requires enormous quantities of water. Electric vehicles and new forms of “clean” energy are thus entangled with the drying of land and with the region’s history of coal extraction. Abandoned coal mines have become reservoirs of iron-rich sludge that contaminates surrounding waterways.
Hans Baumann’s research focuses on the Salton Sea in collaboration with the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Tribal Community. Together they consider how to establish a relationship with a highly polluted body of water shaped by federal definitions, fish farming, irrigation, algae, labor migration from Mexico, and the construction of new utopias.
Wetlands in Chile and Argentina play crucial ecological and economic roles. Yet agriculture, urbanization, and water-intensive extraction have contributed to their destruction, leading to biodiversity loss and the disappearance of habitats.
Water scarcity is a growing global concern with the potential to produce conflict, particularly where resources are limited and populations are increasing. Climate change intensifies this problem by altering precipitation patterns and increasing the risk of drought.
In 1977, President Jimmy Carter warned that the energy crisis would continue to worsen without immediate action. His address is included here as evidence that alternative futures have repeatedly been imagined—and repeatedly deferred.
Part II of the program included a special addition by the collective Nambi Rimai.
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