The Earth can by no means belong to anyone species, says Emanuele Coccia. “And it is just if the town ceases to consider itself as an inconceivable “naturally human ecosystem” against different ‘naturally nonhuman’ or ‘wild’ ecosystems that it is going to be capable of speak in confidence to many different species. All species are tenants on this planet.” The seventh Lisbon Structure Triennale, titled How Heavy is a Metropolis?, presents a coalition of architectural investigations that spiral into absurdity, echoing the complexities of the modern metropolis. Confronted with the perplexity of our present social, political and ecological crises, the triennial proposes a brand new imaginary for the town: one that’s knowledgeable by the complexity of all its materials fluxes. Contoured by way of a coalition of questions, the town emerges right here as an internet of interdependencies, without delay all over the place and nowhere, engulfing each “metropolis” and “countryside” in a fruits of the technosphere-driven acceleration of power and materials extraction.
Curated by Territorial Company (Ann-Sofi Rönnskog and John Palmesino) throughout eight venues, the triennial options three principal exhibitions—“Fluxes,” “Spectres” and “Lighter”—in addition to quite a few unbiased tasks, the general public program “Discuss, Discuss, Discuss” curated by Filipa Ramos and an accompanying virtually 300-page publication with contributions by Emanuele Coccia, Bruno Latour, Kate Crawford and lots of extra. Spectacular and overwhelming in equal measures, the Lisbon Structure Triennale nonetheless incites a deep drive for change. Toes firmly planted on the bottom and adopting a extra scientific strategy, it doesn’t draw back from the hurt that modern cities inflict on our planet, nor does it provide options to this predicament. As a substitute, we discover ourselves half and parcel of the continuing state of disappearance that’s the dizzying maze of the modern metropolis.
City “Fluxes” of the technosphere
The previous energy station of MAAT—Museum of Artwork, Structure and Know-how hosts “Fluxes,” the primary exhibition of the triennial. After some references to futurist architect Buckminster Fuller, it begins with Katherinne Fiedler’s harrowing video set up Guardians (2024). The video exhibits canine strolling by way of grand, empty buildings, questioning the idea of monumentalization. With a knot in my abdomen attributable to the canine’ amplified panting, I discover myself in a hall created by large-scale boards positioned at an angle inwards above my head. Like hard-to-read hieroglyphs, they comprise the white-on-black schema of Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Calculating Empires, A Family tree of Know-how and Energy since 1500 (2023). The work poses the query ‘Who measures?’ by tracing the more and more authoritarian techniques of communication, computation, management and classification; haunting phrases charting how now we have come to right this moment’s tech constructions of mass surveillance, a planetary disaster countered by guarantees of techno-solutionism and an accelerating extraction of all of the Earth’s life and assets.
“Fluxes” is anxious with the fabric fluxes and dynamic processes of world cities in addition to the buildup of power and knowledge that they’re constructed upon: the so-called technosphere. The principle show options 5-10 minute movies taking part in on horizontally hung screens positioned at knee top and suspended from the ceiling on clear vinyl curtains. When attempting to soak up the abstract of years of investigation and complicated evaluation, the viewer must lean over the screens and into the architectural investigations uncomfortably. The works every contribute a query on the parts of the town and its interdependencies. ‘We could maintain oil within the floor?’ Iwan Baan asks, sharing how our reliance on petroleum fuels each the technosphere and its instability. ‘How heavy is air?’ Trescientosmil asks, exploring how the acceleration of the carbon cycle drives local weather change and intensifies the technosphere. ‘How does measuring change the town?’ FAUP pertinently considers, exhibiting how measuring is itself an agent of city transformation.
The technosphere, outlined as equal to the modern metropolis, performs a major function in these questions and warrants additional clarification. A time period first coined by Peter Haff, it’s best defined in an unbiased challenge on view at Palácio Sinel de Cordes: Brittany Uttering’s The Sixth Sphere. That includes a mess of architectural investigations, it introduces the technosphere as follows:
Entangled throughout the Earth’s 5 pure spheres—lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, cryosphere and environment—lies a sixth: the technosphere, a planetary infrastructure of extraction and industrial manufacturing. Vital to our survival, its exponential progress destabilizes the very spheres upon which it relies upon.
Uttering divides the technosphere into three components: (M1) molecular, (M2) machinic and (M3) metabolic. Charting these, we discover the technosphere engulfing all Earth as we all know it: from carbon dioxide emissions and the plastic pollution that the oil business will launch with the fossil gasoline market’s decline—to the extraction, use, waste and influence of constructing supplies.
Problematically, the theoretical underpinning of the triennial argues that we should settle for “the necessity for growing technospheric power consumption [and] … compromise with this new world system in a method that each humanity and the technosphere can, at the least within the quick run, obtain their most elementary objective, survival,” though the technosphere will, in the long term, “lose its inner coherence and, in consequence, the flexibility to enhance and maintain human well-being.”
These elementary contradictions of the triennial’s investigations lie on the coronary heart of the best way the triennial is conceived and, conversely, the way it conceives of the modern metropolis. By offering an immense quantity of numerous information, the triennial takes us to the just about surreal absurdity of the present human situation. A lot in order that the very concept of measuring, informing and inventing feels virtually superfluous, disembodied from a world of human and other-than-human connection and care.
“Spectres” of an ongoing state of disappearance
At MUDE—Design Museum, we encounter “Spectres,” which extends the idea of the town past its conventional borders into the “ghost acreages” that offer it with the fabric and power it wants. The exhibition opens with Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith’s large-scale set up Correspondences, whose harrowing narration tells tales of ravaging forest fires, repeated extinction of species, quickly melting glaciers and catastrophic climate occasions. Sitting on the museum’s chilly ground and watching the imagery intensify, I can virtually contact the will to behave towards the machine of extractive capitalism washing over the room, giving texture and face to the numbers—a counterpoint to the scientific calculations of “Fluxes.”
This emotive place to begin is adopted by a grid of horizontally hung screens: every row displaying an architectural inquiry simply as in “Fluxes.” The collective imagining and mutual reflective criticism current of their succession is nothing in need of good. An instance is Daniel Miller and Marina Otero Verzier’s items, which ask ‘How heavy is a digital twin?’ and ‘Can a nation be with out land?’ by that includes Tuvalu, a small island nation that’s anticipated to vanish resulting from rising sea ranges. Looking for to deal with the problem of a nation dropping its land, the challenge presents a visionary proposal for the world’s first digital nation, run on blockchain. That is immediately adopted by its counterpoint, with FAUP questioning the very concept of a nation with What’s the weight of a border?
Strolling by way of the architectural investigations of “Spectres” to the soundscape of Correspondences, I discover myself caught with a sense of a haunting actuality that I encountered within the opening of “Fluxes.” This haunting high quality of the triennial might maybe be greatest understood by way of the lens of Ackbar Abbas’ idea on the tradition and politics of disappearance, initially formulated as a steady state to explain Hong Kong’s cultural response after 1997. Watching tales of lands which might be quickly to be engulfed by rising sea ranges, species pushed to extinction and muograph pictures tracing hidden voids, we discover ourselves within the midst of architectural responses to a everlasting state of disappearance on a planetary scale.
Seen from this angle, the Seventh Lisbon Triennial of Structure reveals a reimagining of the modern metropolis as a steady state of disappearance, with people inevitably grappling for options that slip by way of their fingers because the technospheric acceleration will increase. Not capable of act with safety and permanence in a state of flux, people discover themselves as a substitute haunted by the previous—because the ghosts of unfinished nuclear energy vegetation with Paul Cetnarski’s Roadside Picnic—and by the current—as the company and state pursuits focusing on lithium extraction with Tiago Patata’s unbiased challenge and discuss on the grassroots resistance in Barroso, Portugal, towards this subsequent step of world extractivism.
“Lighter” by making house for motion
MAC/CCB—Museum of Up to date Artwork and Structure Centre options the ultimate main exhibition of the triennial: “Lighter.” In distinction to the horizontal grids of screens present in “Fluxes” and “Spectres,” the primary screens in “Lighter” are vertical, positioned inside a maze of curtains that requires the viewer to hunt out the movies documenting tasks that discover various potentialities for the longer term. This curatorial shift, with the viewers upright and in movement, locations us able from which we are able to react to the works and, maybe, even take motion.
The alternate options for the longer term that “Lighter” provides generally tend towards the techno-solutionism that the triennial without delay criticizes and harbors an inclination. Two works, nevertheless, stand out as an exception: Lynn Margulis’ The Tissue of Gaia from the Symbiotic Earth Assortment (1993) and WORKOVERTIME’s A Metabolic Commons—Many Palms Make Mild Work (2025). The primary delightfully refuses the parable of the Anthropocene by exhibiting microorganisms because the true stewards of the Earth. The latter focuses as a substitute on the human relationship, emphasizing the necessity to develop an infrastructure of care quite than exploitation.
“Lighter” efficiently drives motion, and I quickly discover myself strolling out of the triennial’s livid. First, I naively direct this fury on the present itself for being a techno-driven exhibition that questions the technosphere. A fury for the triennial—inevitably and certainly purposefully—mirroring the technosphere being constructed on worlds that its very existence destroys. The place, past glimpses of extra delicate works and collective resistances, do we discover nature in all of this? How can we escape the loop of the technosphere?
With time, I discover the fury to be, as a substitute, in opposition to the constructions of individualism, extractivism and exploitation that gasoline our crises; towards our incapability to transcend the technosphere. Finally, the seventh Lisbon Triennale of Structure not solely questions how heavy a metropolis is, however conjures up an upturning of the established order—not from a spot of emotion however from a spot of science. By way of this, it exhibits all of the extra starkly the everlasting state of disappearance now we have discovered ourselves in. By introducing a dizzying array of questions, information and measures, the triennial prompts us to reject resolution after resolution till we reject solutionism in its entirety whereas refusing to surrender, give in, or present any solutions.
The Lisbon Structure Triennale, How Heavy is a Metropolis?, is on view at MAAT—Museum of Artwork, Structure and Know-how, MUDE—Design Museum and MAC/CCB—Museum of Up to date Artwork and Structure Centre, in addition to Palácio Sinel de Cordes, MNAC—Nationwide Museum of Up to date Artwork, Estufa Fria and Atelier Amadeo by way of December 8, 2025.
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