Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth is an edited volume emerging from the ZKM (Karlsruhe) exhibition of almost the same name: Critical Zones: Observatories for Earth Politics. While the book is edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, the curatorial team of the exhibition also included Martin Guinard, Bettina Korintenberg and Jessica Menger. The exhibition, although hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and thus mostly shown online, gathered much attention in its own right, as it featured several exciting projects on mediations of nature, entanglements of technosphere and biosphere, and different aesthetic responses to the Anthropocene.
The whole project (the book and the exhibition) carries with it a strong commitment to the belief that art-science collaborations can act as techniques of complexification: Critical Zones announces that we need “a new earthly politics,” thus echoing Latour’s recent years of work. In this case, “earthbound” becomes specified however...