Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Rania Ghosn
Climate change is not only a crisis of the physical environment but also a predicament of the cultural environment and in turn requires a renewed media strategy to make public such planetary concern. This essay considers the role of architectural media within the context of a pedagogic experiment called Earth on Display. The workshop deployed design research to engage in the difficult (and necessary) quest of climate change communication in museums of science and nature. In recent years, natural history museums have introduced climate change to their programming. The scientific language of such climate exhibits remains however inaccessible to most visitors and with little impact on their affective experience or their political actions. How can climate change be imagined, spatialized, and experienced and come to matter? What are the representational worlds –the Anthropocene “cabinet of curiosities” and “wonders”–that move from abstract knowledge to material evidence to render climate change senseable, and actionable to broader publics? The workshop, taught by the author of this essay, was conducted with the support of the Harvard Museum of Natural History and culminated in the installation of The Chamber of the Anthropocene temporary exhibit in the museum’s Climate Change Gallery. At once a curatorial exercise and a speculative geographic landscape, Earth on Display mediated climate knowledge through the aesthetic and spatial qualities of things. Objects, cabinets, remains: here is an assembling of wonders from a damaged planet, brought together in order to cultivate the arts of remembering effectively, so as to care seriously, to care for, to care with. Each essay is a provocation to curiosity in the sense of incitement to feel,know, care, and respond.—Donna Haraway.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.108.55
Volume Editors
ISBN
978-1-944214-26-5
