Climate Peace
Lecture by Ann-Sofi Rönnskog—Territorial Agency as part of GLC lecture series Ruptured Landscapes curated by Aristide Antonas.
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.
Ann-Sofi Rönnskog—Territorial Agency
Territorial Agency is an independent organisation established by architects and urbanists Ann-Sofi Rönnskog and John Palmesino. Territorial Agency combines contemporary architecture, art, spatial analysis, advocacy and action to promote comprehensive territorial transformations in the Anthropocene epoch. Projects include the Anthropocene Observatory with Armin Linke and Anselm Franke, the Museum of Oil with Greenpeace and Bruno Latour, Oceans in Transformation with TBA21 Academy, Sensible Zone and North. Ann-Sofi and John teach at the AA Architectural Association in London. Ann-Sofi has affiliations with ETH Studio Basel—Contemporary City Institute, AHO Oslo, Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, London. Territorial Agency was awarded the STARTS PRIZE 2021 – Grand prize of the European Commission honouring innovation in technology, industry and society stimulated by the arts – Artistic Exploration.