Shaping Atmospheres

Forensic Architecture presents Cloud Studies (2020) as part of the group exhibition Shaping Atmospheres at the Architecture + Design Gallery at the University of Toronto.

Shaping Atmospheres traces the arc of humanity’s enduring relationship to the Sun and our planet’s nebulous environment.

As our relationship to the Sun is physical and cyclical, so is the exhibition, revolving around an immersive looping film program. In medias res, the exhibition opens with the soundscape of a solar eclipse, enwrapping the listener in a moment of darkness before the first light of the Sun breaks the cosmic stillness. Harkening back to when these occurrences were powerful celestial events, the proceeding video returns to ancient Iranian Mithraic practices when sun worship was perhaps forged as a response to an ecological disaster over 4,000 years ago.

Such history can be seen as the beginning of a long lineage of ideology that attempts to harness the productive powers of the Sun as well as mitigate its destructive potential: from the birth of monotheistic religions, through mystical teachings and socialist revolutions. Today, spiritual traditions are sublimated into technological forces driving a solar economy. Instead of evil spirits descending from the sky, we are now concerned with solar storms and heat waves. Our reality inverts: we fear the life-supporting sun, the Amazon emits more carbon than it stores. After millennia of terraforming across continents, the divide between natural and artificial evaporates. Terraforming shifts into aeroforming. The 20th century, shaped by total war (gas warfare) and system’s theory (weather modelling), has in turn propelled the 21st century’s drive towards geoengineering the atmosphere. What are the dangers and potentials of such extreme interventions? Have we faced such challenges before? The cycle closes with a meditative video of a volcano, the mythical Mount Ararat, shrouded in passing clouds. Fade to black. We enter the stillness once again of a solar eclipse.