Conference Presentation
2-5 Nov 2017, Lancaster
From necrotopias to thalassopias: designing spatial (dis)continuities in Calatrava’s
Museum of Tomorrow
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The
Museum of Tomorrow is a neo-futurist architectural creation and an
educational-touristic landmark erected in an abandoned and crime-infested port
(Porto Maravilha) of Rio de Janeiro
before Rio 2016. Situated in a heritage site that brings together the city’s
past and future legacies, it was intended as a problematisation of humanity’s
survival in the context of climate change and unrestrained capitalist
development. Its principal conception by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava,
and completion with audio-visual installations by an international artistic
contingent, including American artists and Brazilian filmmaker and ceremonial
director Fernando Meirelles, showcase the complexities of global imaginaries of
mobility.
As a
multi-scalar initiative featuring local, state and international partners, the
Museum showcases the ways concerns over ecosystemic erosion are addressed in
performative/artistic ways. I argue that its artistic/architectural creators
call into being a dual utopic method: as an artistic practice and a form of
recreation of life from death. First, I speculate how, by enrooting the Museum
in Rio’s built maritime environment, local heritage conservation and
spatialized social inequalities, they enact a ‘choreotopographic tour’, a
ritualistic journey through cultural sites for global visitors. Second, I
examine how its installations produce dark travel through the mobilisation of
technology: a haphazard esoteric audio-visual journey that concludes with a
potential return to humanity’s roots, Nature. Combining embodied (walking
around the Museum’s heritage environs) and cognitive mobilities (speculating humanity/earth’s
end and potential ‘beginnings’ in the Museum’s interior, through its
audio-visual installations/artefacts), the Museum produces utopian
meta-movement. With industrial modernism as its core, this meta-movement compels
visitors to oscillate physically, emotionally and cognitively between necrotopic scenarios (environmental
erosion, slum pollution, Brazil’s submerged slave heritage) and thalasso(to)pic[1] fluidity (tourism, the
possibility to attain good life, hope).
