Speculative Models for the Present

X:

Y:

P[10]The Metabolic Sublime

Client

Medialab Matadero

Location

Madrid [Spain]

Year

2022-2023

Output

Digital Archive
Interview Series
Road Movie

Linking

Planetarian Conceptual Frameworks

To

National
Cultural
Institutional
Context

By locating them in relation

Political processes
Geological processes

And bringing it down

To the Territory

C[01]Intro

The Metabolic Sublime was a 6-month interdisciplinary program that problematized the current material energetic regimes on a planetary scale as well as possible alternatives of ecosystemic governance.

Within an ambitious and intentionally eclectic public program, the work developed by Raft was responsible for linking, unifying and giving internal consistency to the different themes exposed through readings, workshops and citizen projects. It also put a special effort into establishing explicit links between the theoretical frameworks discussed and the immediate cultural, social and political context. As well as bringing theory down to earth and situating it in close relationship to historical, political and geological processes.

The development of three work packages supported this work. These included:

– A digital archive

– A collection of interviews

– A video essay

C[02]Digital Archive

The archive provides a comprehensive set of conceptual frameworks and operational resources that are critical for understanding our present and past energy-material regimes and for posing future alternatives and models of ecosystem governance.

It materializes in a collection of books, articles, laws, reports and documents that draw from different disciplines and address critical issues for the laboratory, such as the climate and environmental crises, food regimes and agrilogistics, energy management, land use, wastestreams, material resources and our conceptions of labour.

It is born with the intention not to represent a single point of view but the emerging tensions between a multitude of these and to raise a critical perspective while describing the objects it criticizes and the reasons for its structure.

01.

Click here to visit full Metabolic Archives.

C[03]Interview Series

This chapter presents a series of conversations that attempt to contextualize the theoretical framework of ‘The Metabolic Sublime’ within the current project of ecological transition on a global, European and national scale.

Each interview presents an alternative perspective from specific disciplines, including institutional policy-making, thermodynamics, material flow economy, environmental and ecological design history, media theory, urbanism and energy activism.

Each conversation was organized around insights, concepts or critical standpoints from the interviewees’ work that were subsequently integrated into the overarching narrative of the video essay.

02.

For better viewing experience, watch all interviews on the Metabolic Sublime Website.

[01]Rosa Martínez

In this interview, Rosa Martínez discusses the current ecological transition project from an institutional point of view, deconstructing it as a political project working at multiple scales, a multi-sectoral industrial project, and a socio-cultural project. The interviewee also presents the current blockages to this process as well as strategies necessary for its advancement.

[02]Alvaro Campos

Alvaro Campos presents a thermodynamic review of the characteristics and potentialities of fossil and renewable energies. He also provides a critical view of how the latter are being implemented in the territory, with a particular focus on the massive electrification project based on megaprojects and high voltage interconnections.

[03]Alicia Valero

In this interview, Alicia Valero introduces the concept of ‘exergy’ as a tool to measure the material capacities of the planet. She presents a non-exhaustive list of critical raw material peaks for the current energy transition project, and recognizes the impossibility of total circularity due to the thermodynamic principles of entropy and dispersion. She also calls for a change in our relationship with waste and the creation of new economic indexes that go beyond growth as a paradigm.

[04]Marco Armiero

Marco Armiero provides a critical vision of the anthropocene as a concept and presents some alternative constructs such as the capitalocene, the plantationocene, and in particular, the ‘wasteocene’. He explains that the term refers not so much to the ‘age of waste’ but to the series of socioecological relations that define which objects, territories, and people are disposable through the extraction and separation of ‘the other’. He calls for the generation of alternative narratives that make these wasted people and places visible.

[05]Alberto Mataran

Alberto Mataran presents a parallelism between contemporary energy production practices, rural-urban relations, and global north-south power relations. He explains how this can help us make the leap from the visualization of existing territorial conflicts in our own territory to global conflicts beyond our borders. He suggests that bioregional design can help balance these conflicts by combining the design of countryside and city and their energy, agricultural, and waste systems.

[06]Juan Infante

In this interview, Juan Infante takes us through the quantified material ‘consumption footprint’ of national agrilogistical systems during the 20th and 21st centuries. He focuses on the elements externalized to other territories and reviews the material balance, or rather lack of material balance, between the “input” and “output” of traditionally exploited territories.

[07]Lydia Kallypoliti

Lydia Kallypoliti deconstructs the history of ecological design and critiques the paradoxes in the field of sustainability. She provides a critique of both the idea of closure and closed systems as design tools for physical and information spaces, and the idea of extreme interconnectivity as a chimera that hides the inability to establish explicit connections.

[08]Jennifer Gabrys

Jennifer Gabrys presents an environmental conception of global computing technologies that puts specific focus on the types of sensitive mechanisms and how the interactions between humans and sensing infrastructures during and after their useful life can create new conceptions of participatory citizenship.

C[04]Videoessay

This piece is the key to establishing the link between theory and territory within the research. The territory is where ideas, policies, technological systems and operational logics materialize, overlap and touch explicitly. It is also where tensions emerge and the movie’s principal character.

The video essay points out the importance of the present historical moment by relating it to political and geological chronologies. The script of this piece maintains the structure of a classic strategy report that breaks down the historical relationships between civilization and energy in its different forms, highlighting the vicissitudes of the current ecological transition project and then outlining the issues and insights generated during the development of the various workshops, interviews and archives carried out during the Sublime Metabolic Laboratory.

Acknowledging the paradox of using a combustion engine as a mediating element, the delivery of this report materializes in the form of a road movie which travels through three Spanish operational territories that are critical for the European life project.

[01]Escombreras Terminal (Port of Cartagena)

The Escombreras terminal of the Port of Cartagena is the gateway for 14% of the LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) entering Spain, which has 35% of the European storage capacity and the largest network of regasification plants on the continent, a symbol of the fossil paradigm that is trying to reinvent itself as a sustainable milestone with the construction of the largest hydrogen electrolysis plant on the Iberic peninsula. According to Repsol, the promoting partner of the initiative, the plant will reach 552 MW of installed capacity to produce renewable hydrogen in 2025 and 1.9 GW in 2030. This capacity represents almost 50% of the Spanish government’s commitment.

[02]Mula Solar Photovoltaic Park

La Mula Solar Power Plant is a photovoltaic mega-project of 493.74 MW of peak power that covers 1,000 ha belonging to the municipality of Mula in Murcia (Spain). It was built by Cobra (ACS Group) and inaugurated in July 2019. At its opening, it was the largest photovoltaic power plant in Europe, surpassing the Cestas Solar Park in France. Today, in March 2023, it is still the second biggest photovoltaic plant in Europe, after the Nuñez de Balboa plant in Badajoz, with a peak power of 500MW.

[03] Mar de Plástico, Murcia

60% of the vegetables consumed in Europe are grown in 35,000 hectares of solar greenhouses located in Almeria and the coast of Granada. With a yearly production of 4.5 million tons of fruit, El Mar de Plastico is arguably the most recognisable agrilogistic hub within the Iberic Peninsula.

Conceptually, each of these infrastructures represents a way of relating to the sun and results from taking a logic to its final consequences. Each of them offers opportunities and can also be considered a future ruin. While the script breaks down several confronting perspectives of what each of these landscapes represents, the camera tries to collect an uncritical look, the fruit of the fascination for the industrial and crushing implacability that the methodical application of Cartesian logic imposes on the territory.

Ultimately, the piece represents a call for the resignification of guiding concepts and the inversion of our operational logic in the world, which involves the recognition of our own intelligence, agency and work capacity as tools to combat entropy, energy loss and material dispersion in order to maximize the regenerative capacities of the planet.

Projects

Description

Client

P[10]Metabolic Sublime
Road Movie meets Energy Regime

Medialab Matadero

[+]

The Metabolic Sublime was a 6-month interdisciplinary program that problematized the current material energetic regimes on a planetary scale as well as possible alternatives of ecosystemic governance. The works developed by Raft were responsible for linking, unifying and giving internal consistency to the different themes exposed through readings, workshops and citizen projects. It was supported in the development of three work packages: A digital archive, a collection of interviews and a road movie.

[ ]See Full Project

Location

Madrid [Spain]

Year

2022-2023

Output

Digital Archive, Interview Series, Road Movie

P[09]Bio-Fold
FRAKTA Fetish for a Biodegradable Material Culture

IKEA: SPACE10

[+]

Bio-Fold stands at the intersection of material technology and cultural strategy. It deals with critical global issues such as plastic waste, soil scarcity, and deforestation due to agricultural development. Playing with cultural heritage, the project uses FRAKTA, IKEA’s iconic tote bag, as a symbolic device for the introduction of an already existing technology: vacuum bagging, in this case applied to biocomposite materials.

[ ]See Full Project

Location

Copenhagen [Denmark]

Year

2019 - Present

Output

Fabrication method | Digital interface

P[08]Seiche
Automated Bureaucracy as a Pathway to Fluid Citizenship

Strelka Institute: The New Normal

[+]

Overlapping jurisdictions and supranational infrastructures generate an increasingly complex network topology; the design, management, and mapping of their interactions is therefore a crucial task. Seiche is a speculative proposal for a visual programming platform enabling the definition and management of techno-legal procedures of information exchange between institutions that regulate such systems and the organisations that operate within.

[ ]See Full Project

Location

Khorgos [Kazakhstan]

Year

2018 - Present

Output

Speculative short film | Article | Interactive installation

P[07]Siren
Audiovisual Arctic Poem on Connective Alienation

Strelka Institute: The New Normal

[+]

Siren oscillates between the silence of the now deserted destination node of Magadan and the fullness of the fragmented archives that capture its evolution from a place of extraction to a place of archive. It emerges from statistical and interview-based research into port automation and the global inversion of gender patterns in supply chain employment...

[ ]See Full Project

Location

Kolyma [Russia]

Year

2018

Output

Speculative short film

P[06]Æffect
Acid Infused Journal on Innovation Management

UAL: Central Saint Martins

[+]

Æffect grew as a bottom-up student-led initiative to create a strong and self-perpetuating community connecting innovation management students at CSM with alumni, staff and industry leaders through a mentorship scheme, an academic journal and web platform...

[ ]See Full Project

Location

London [UK]

Year

2017 - 2018

Output

Mentorship scheme | Academic journal | Web platform

P[05]Electric Cloud
Decentralised Networks of Energy Exchange

EDF: Électricité de France

[+]

The combined disruption of smart home devices and decentralised energy production and storage systems favour a progressive switch to ‘prosumerism’ in the energy market. Electric Cloud provided a strategy for EDF to adopt an ambivalent position as managers and traders in energy exchange networks, a role that would help them thrive in both a centralised or decentralised scenario...

[ ]See Full Project

Location

London [UK]

Year

2016 - 2017

Output

Business model | Strategic road map

P[04]Critical Firm
Political Conflict as a Business Strategy in the Age of Purpose

Self-directed

[+]

With ongoing, deep, systemic trust crises across western societies, the rise of populist politics can be understood as a failure of corporate social responsibility - the hegemonic identity of the corporate establishment during the last two decades - to engage extensive sectors of a highly polarised population. To reinstate trust among those sectors, the corporate world needs to perform a parallelism that offers symbolic resolutions to the ongoing societal tensions...

[ ]See Full Project

Location

London [UK]

Year

2016 - 2017

Output

Strategic report | System map

P[03]Discourse on Trends
Assembly Toolkit for Authenticity in the Digital Fluid

Self-directed

[+]

A shift towards fluidity in the discourse of authenticity in gender, sexual, and racial identity has already established the generating of a new structure of power and knowledge. As technology continues to dilute the lines between physical and digital space and persona, a new regime of truth on authenticity and identity around fluidity between physical and digital environments will follow…

[ ]See Full Project

Location

London [UK]

Year

2016 - 2017

Output

Strategic report | System map

P[02]Radical Swissness
An Architectural Framework for the Swiss Vernacular

group8

[+]

Define and perfection a framework and methodology for the development of architectural competitions within the Swiss context (a.k.a. domesticating the creative willpower of multidisciplinar international teams to fit the swiss vernacular...

[ ]See Full Project

Location:

Genève [Switzerland]

Year:

2014-2015

Output:

Architectural competition [with several awards]

P[01]UNOG
Energetic renovation of the United Nations Palace

group8

[+]

In a demonstration of its commitment to the Strategic Heritage Plan, the Swiss Federal Council participated in the renovation of the “Palais des Nations” through a voluntary contribution of CHF 50 million. The aim of the renovation project was to bring The United Nations Palace into line with the concept of a "green building"...

[ ]See Full Project

Location

Genève [Switzerland]

Year

2012 - 2014

Output

Restored building | Automated energy management system