guest:
Samir Bantal & Rem Koolhaas
According to the celebrated author Charles C. Mann, two characters can be distinguished in the way we deal with the crisis of our planetary existence: that of the magician and that of the prophet. The magician believes that science, technology, and innovation will offer a way out of the increasing pressure of the climate crisis. The prophet, by contrast, thinks we should be satisfied with less, that we should adapt ourselves better to the rhythm of nature. That we need to better understand the natural limits of the earth and that we should by all means solve our problems within them. Confronted with this stark contrast, most people will say that they are both the magician and the prophet. Or rather, they hover somewhat in between, which may sound less heroic but much more realistic.
In February 2020, Samir Bantal and Rem Koolhaas opened their exhibition Countryside, The Future in the Guggenheim in New York. For ten years, they worked on a widely ramified study of contemporary developments in the countryside, together with their team from OMA/AMO and a range of universities from the United States, Kenya, Russia and China. According to both, the big changes in the way in which we live have, for a long time, not been happening in the city anymore, but in the areas outside them, in the countryside. Rural areas are hit hardest by the consequences of climate change, but most likely also offer the best solutions to deal with them, according to Koolhaas and Bantal.
Koolhaas is well-known as an influential architect who can unpack an elaborate philosophy of urban life within the parameters of one building. He is an unconventional sharp-witted thinker, who can provoke with observations that are so inescapable that everyone tends to overlook them. For example, he once started his career as an architect with the statement that the Berlin Wall was "an architectural masterpiece"; pointed out early on that our urge for conservation has turned historic cities into backdrops for tourist entertainment; and showed, as curator of the Architecture Biennale in Venice, that over the years architecture had been reduced to a centimetre-thin façade to mask pipes, wiring and all kinds of contemporary service installations. Koolhaas's rhetoric is provocative, but above all serves his deep-seated belief that architecture is able to formulate an answer to every complex challenge, and his ambition to employ those skills to address major social issues.
However, during the preparations for this Chapter, I cannot avoid the impression that Koolhaas sounds less resolute when he talks about contemporary developments in the countryside. In an interview with Vivian Xinlin Song1, he remarks that the young architects with whom he works define the role of architecture differently; that they are more modest when it comes to the belief that solutions for complex issues such as climate change can be found through architecture. Developments in the countryside no longer take place according to big master plans, but on the basis of local strategies, processes and methods, no radical revolutions but an extrapolation of positive forces on a small scale. He wonders aloud whether that modesty among a younger generation of architects is an expression of a lack of ambition, or if it is actually the best way of dealing with contemporary challenges. "In order to bring out drastic changes to our current situation, we first need to be extremely modest, because it was a lack of modesty that brought us these problems to begin with. But at the same time, you can’t be modest when making the drastic changes that are needed now", according to Koolhaas.
Samir Bantal, Koolhaas's associate in the Countryside-project, is from a different generation. He spent the first years of his life on a farm in the Rif region of Morocco, after which he moved to IJsselstein near Utrecht with his parents. The family still spent summer holidays in Douar Leghriba, during which they noticed year after year they became slightly more estranged from rural life. "We slowly became city-dwellers, tourists in the countryside", Bantal writes in Taschen's publication Countryside, A Report (2020). Earlier, Bantal worked together with the late designer Virgil Abloh on his solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, in which they gave expression to a contemporary kind of designer/artist as a tourist. Someone who, unlike a purist, always comes from outside, who moves freely through all kinds of cultures and environments, and open-mindedly let themselves be surprised by the artistic values that emerge.2 Bantal seems driven less by the thought that all-encompassing solutions for complex challenges, such as climate issues, can be found through architecture, but rather that solutions emerge from an interplay of intrinsic local knowledge, dense social networks, and technology. In the Countryside-publication, Bantal shows photos of his fashionable parents from the time when they still lived on the farm in Morocco and notes that rural areas have always been highly receptive to the influence of urban trends, sometimes at the expense of the local structures. But we have arrived at the point where that influence should actually move in the other direction, where urban life should increasingly 'ruralise'. "To enable a sustainable life on earth we should look at the countryside, which is at the forefront of our struggle against climate change, the struggle for food security and an inclusive balance with nature", according to Bantal.
With their Countryside-research, Bantal and Koolhaas want to generate attention for the fact that over the past 30 years the cosmopolitan way of living, merely driven by economic values, has largely ignored the deep knowledge and intrinsic logic of life in non-urban areas, leaving an enormous capacity of knowledge out of consideration.
These observations do not exist in a vacuum, but are part of a broader paradigm shift, characterised by an increasing awareness that humanity will have to forge a different relationship with its (natural) environment if it wants to survive on this planet. The idea that we can exercise complete control over our environment – characteristic of the Western capitalist philosophy – increasingly gives way to the realisation that we have to re(dis)cover a balanced with nature, and that radical systemic change is needed in order to safeguard our future.
While working with Bantal and Koolhaas on Chapter 5IVE, keeping up with current events seems impossible: there are farmers protest against nitrogen measures; a worldwide pandemic occurs as a result of ecological imbalance; countless storms, forest fires and floods across the world; and finally a war in Ukraine that, apart from nationalist rhetoric, seems to be to a significant extent about the enormous grain production that the country abounds in, and on which many countries depend. Any direct solution to these challenges seems to be surrounded by countless counterarguments. The urgency of politicians when addressing the climate often turns out to be extremely fragile and passes as quickly as it comes.3 The question arises whether thinking in comprehensive, direct solutions is still relevant today, or whether the most drastic change that we can bring about right now would be a change in mentality?
Together with Bantal and Koolhaas, we finally decide to put our focus on visual art, because it allows us to hop between different thoughts and in a sense to reflect, or to quote Donna Haraway's well-known phrase once more, stay with the trouble.
The result is an exhibition that adresses the conflicts that seem to be embedded in the Western capitalist lifestyle, and explores how we can relate to the biggest challenge of our times. The artworks in this exhibition are a meditation on a deep experience of time, the forging of a connection with locality and ancestral links to the land; they follow the journeys of seeds, the flows of fertile mud, and of saline water; they observe how technology does not only offer solutions, but also creates a new wilderness in which humans not necessarily predominate; and, finally, make us aware that each landscape is irreversibly a political landscape that bears both the scars and the fruits of its habitation. The belief in innovation and technology goes hand in hand with the wish to be satisfied with less, the magician and the prophet turn out to be in continuous dialogue with each other.
RIEKE VOS
CURATOR, HET HEM