Location: Deep Sea
Date: 2021
Programme: Urban planning
Client: N/A
Status: Ongoing
Area: N/A
Budget: N/A
Team: Traumnovelle (architects)
Umwelten
The Animal People
In a bid to maintain human inhabitation of the Earth, humans have begun to draw from the genetic pool of the animal kingdom in order to adapt their bodies to the changing planetary conditions. Bodies are hybridized, reinforced, augmented and otherwise fitted to survive the extreme weather conditions and hostile lands of the anthropocene which challenge human exploitation of the increasingly sparse resources. These human-animal hybrids, although they collectively form the human species, develop modes of interaction with their environment which are the direct consequence of their hybridization, each developing their own Umwelt.
The concept of Umwelt is used to explore humans’ modes of interaction with their environment. Umwelten are the different ways living beings perceive the world through their biological and cultural constitutions. Thus different species sharing the same have environment have different Umwelten. Umwelten challenge the anthropocentric value-system which holds that humankind rules over all living and non-living beings. It allows to consider humans as belonging to their environment rather than as exterior beings granted the right of acting upon it.
The supposed primitiveness and grotesque of organic hybrids is set in contrast with the absurdity of so-called rational and scientific belief systems which are leading to their own collapse.The Animal People invent the animism of the anthropocene, which does not oppose living and dying, body and machine, artificial and natural, truth and spirit.
Rusty iron legs
Brushed by swirling sea
spray
My antenna dance
Fearless fleshy claws
Heave the sea-bed Laden
ores
Till they can no more
Humm clang bang vroom
beep
The wind carries the
sounds of
The aerial docks
Fly into the haze
The shifting wind hums and
bangs
With the city’s work
The enhanced human
Once again harvests the
riches
Of a dead planet
Bodies encumbered
Hybrids fitted to the task
Both mourn our freedom
