Exodusolarism: Walking cities in light
2022 Hong Kong Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture (UABB)
Golden Beer Shop 9 Dongchang Road, Luohu District, Shenzhen, China
The Ninth Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB) officially opened to the public in Shenzhen on Sunday, and it will run until March 12, 2023. The main exhibition venue is located at what used to be the Kingway Brewery in Luohu District (Golden Beer Shop 9 Dongchang Road, Luohu District Shenzhen). Themed “Urban Cosmologies," the three-month exhibition in Shenzhen is jointly curated by architecture and urban planning scholar Lu Andong, young architect Wang Zigeng, and design curator Aric Chen.
Our team presented a narrative work, “Exodusolarism: Walking Cities in Light”, in the “Future Community” section. The installation works take "Exodus" as the background and present the story of human beings escaping to a "better sun" and "better earth" due to the expansion and collapse of the sun. Taking "environmental control" of Banham’s air-conditioning as a metaphor, the development of human beings becomes the inside of the "environmental bubble", and the earth's life outside, making the earth contradictory as a "leaky refrigerator" that humans have failed to cool and control. The earth and the sun are positioned as colonies of capital and human development and expansion, and environmental regulation is the means and processing of colonization. After "exodus from the earth", the sun in the floating starry sky has almost become the only source of energy capitalism, and the space of the solar system is contested by humans. The work proposed as Koolhaas asks 'after the core of the sun collapses and the exterior expands, is there still a "better sun" after the exodus from the solar system?'
Formally, the exhibition speculatively unfolds the spatial narrative of "internal" and "external" control of the global environment. The exhibition design uses a new nano-structural color technology to improve the color performance of solar cell devices without affecting power efficiency, leading to a rich color and space experience with different perspectives.