““Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics” is the title of the show that Bruno Latour, a dependable coiner of epistemological metaphors and neologisms, and Peter Weibel, acting as usual as the pandisciplinary authority on all fields and topics, organized for the ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany (the exhibition is their third collaboration at this venue), with staff curators Martin Guinard-Terrin and Bettina Korintenberg. “The best way” to map our beleaguered world is to “see it as a network of CRITICAL ZONES,” according to the exhibition materials. “Generated over eons of time by various life forms, these CRITICAL ZONES form a surface only a few kilometers thin.” The organizers connect their title to the claim that they are taking a fundamentally new approach to the thinkability of life on this planet.”
