An installation that presents a narrative about climate change in an olfactory way.

Facing the climatic situation generated by the depletion of resources of our hitherto unlimited consumption, we collide with a lack of collective motivation and desire to seek sustainable ways of relating with the rest of living and non-living forms of existence. We seem to have lost the ability to empathise with distant events (animal, plant, human, planetary exploitation…), it is as if we could not perceive the polycrisis with our senses. As Günter Anders says, it is supraliminal, it exceeds our capacity for understanding. Therefore it seems like, since we are not connected to the environment and everything that integrates it, we are exempt from responsibility, or respons-ability, for managing it.

Artificial Ecosystem (2024) aims to work with the hypothesis that by using our sense of smell, we can activate empathy mechanisms with which to generate attitudes of care towards the environment in which we live in. The work presents an interpretation of three ecosystems, terrestrial, aquatic and urban, each one carrying a smell that defines it. The smell drops into each ecosystem’s materials composed respectively of silica, algae or minerals inserted in a bioplastic matter. Next to them are bottles containing that smell to which different substances that human beings emit without care for the environment, promoted by extractivist politics and that increase the evolution of climate change such as fuel, waste or ammonia. The public is invited to open the bottles, smell the inside and compare it with the smell that falls drop by drop into the ecosystem.

There is a gas sensor on each ecosystem, as well as an atmospheric one in the room translating the data into sound. Thanks to Arduino and Pure Data visitors can also hear how the sound changes dynamically, as the composition of the air in the room varies, depending on the amount of gases, the temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure of the place.

Commissioned and premiered at Femkultur Festival 2024, Pamplona (ES)

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