After the Cold War: Warm War. How to think through the anxieties of the deep upheavals of the world system and the Earth System? How to imagine new territories of cohabitation when the land is shaken under our feet? How to imagine a space where to be human amidst climate chaos and rapid oscillations of our world?
Climate peace is a way of thinking the current challenges of cohabitation with the Technosphere, away from the unification and globalisation of nature, and away from the equivalence of the modern juridical spaces of the international. The upheaval of the Anthropocene, its intrusion into contemporary life is where we start: the project is to articulate what it means to form a polity without an overarching scheme, what it means to link it to spaces in deep and rapid transformation.
Today, the world is moved by the Earth: Climate Peace is a project to invent new spaces for public diplomacy, engaging the new territories of the intensified Earth processes wrought by the rise of technology of planetary magnitude. It is the alarms and the urgency that make the project of dealing with climate chaos one of peace: not because nature would pacify, as it was conceptualised during the long stability of the Holocene, but because we no longer know the grounds where we stand, and we need to rethink them together.
Territorial Agency is an independent organisation established by architects and urbanists John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog. Territorial Agency combines contemporary architecture, art, spatial analysis, advocacy and action to promote comprehensive territorial transformations in the Anthropocene epoch. Their work focuses on the integration of science, architecture and art in the challenges posed by climate change.
The work of Territorial Agency is grounded in extensive spatial and territorial analysis through remote sensing technologies. Its focus is on complex representations of the transformations of the physical structures of contemporary inhabited territories. Through its work Territorial Agency engages different polities to re-evaluate the relations to the complex material, energy and information fluxes that mark contemporary territories.
Recent projects include: Oceans in Transformation commissioned by TBA21–Academy, in collaboration with ZKM Critical Zones and Taipei Biennial 20; 2040 – Sensible Zone at Barbican Centre (upcoming); Sensible Zone at the Biennale di Venezia and Seoul Biennale of Architecture; Urbanism: Museum of Oil with Greenpeace, ZKM Reset Modernity and Chicago Architecture Biennial; Anthropocene Observatory with Armin Linke and Anselm Franke at HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, BAK Utrecht and in the collection of Centraal Museum Utrecht; Plan the Planet with AA Architectural Association supported by Graham Foundation; North anon at ArkDes; the Museum of Infrastructural Unconscious; and the integrated plan for the Zuiderzee region Unfinishable Markermeer. John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog are Unit Masters at the AA Architectural Association School of Architecture, London.
Territorial Agency is awarded the STARTS PRIZE 2021 – Grand prize of the European Commission honouring innovation in technology, industry and society stimulated by the arts, Artistic Exploration.