Artists and writers portray the disorientation of a world facing climate change. This monumental volume, drawn from a 2020 exhibition at the ZKM Centre for Art and Media, depicts the disorientation of life in a world confronting climate change. It traces this disorientation to the disconnection between two different definitions of the land on which modernising humans live: the sovereign nation from which they derive their rights, and another, hidden, from which they gain their wealth—the land they live on, and the land they live from.

Charting the land they will inhabit, they find not a globe, not the iconic “blue marble,” but a series of critical zones—patchy, heterogeneous, discontinuous. With short pieces, longer essays, and more than 500 illustrations, the contributors explore the new landscape on which it may be possible for humans to land—what it means to be “on Earth,” whether the critical zone, the Gaia, or the terrestrial. They consider geopolitical conflicts and tools redesigned for the new “geopolitics of life forms.”

The “thought exhibition” described in this book can open a fictional space to explore the new climate regime; the rest of the story is unknown.

Contributors include Dipesh Chakrabarty, Pierre Charbonnier, Emanuele Coccia, Vinciane Despret, Jérôme Gaillardet, Donna Haraway, Joseph Leo Koerner, Timothy Lenton, Richard Powers, Simon Schaffer, Isabelle Stengers, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Jan A. Zalasiewicz, Siegfried Zielinski.

Co-published with ZKM | Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe.