BREATHE EARTH COLLECTIVE

As the climate crisis becomes more acute, so does the need to find new strategies for overcoming the biggest challenge facing humanity to date. Yet solving this complex task is possible only if we all work to implement new solutions rapidly and effectively and coordinate our efforts. The Breathe Earth Collective presents a vision of cultural change that sees overcoming the crisis as an organizational task involving the whole of society—to be tackled with boldness and creativity by implementing a new “climate culture” that goes beyond merely implementing design and architecture projects.

 

The exhibition presents the principles of this climate culture, illustrating them through visionary drawings of climate-positive living. This visionary climate culture is based on already tested prototypical climate and air installations that represent different approaches to solving air pollution and overheating. The approaches range from individual activities to large-scale urban planning. Such measures are interrelated, revealing a closely woven network of dependencies—and thus of opportunities for shaping our habitats’ climate culture.

 

The first of such visions is already being realized this year within the framework of the Graz Year of Culture: a prototype model for cooling the city. This forest pavilion is a multisensorial experience that also functions as an agora for a wide-ranging discourse on climate-related topics. Via a live video link, the woodland setting and activities taking place there will be directly visible in the MAK as an active component of the exhibition.
 

Visitors to the exhibition are invited to submerge themselves in these visions of climate culture, to share their thoughts on them, to develop the drawings further, and to suggest their own ideas. The visionary drawings are complemented by atmospheric video recordings and photo material of the Breathe Earth Collective’s projects to date, that help render these visions tangible.

The Breathe Earth Collective sees itself as an interdisciplinary do-and-think-tank for topics relating to air and climate. It works on developing and realizing new, holistic solutions to complex challenges—for instance the creation of urban ecosystems. The transdisciplinary team functions on the interface between architecture, art, and urbanism in non-hierarchical networks. 
 

More information on the Breathe Earth Collective is available at breatheearth.net