Kimberly Bradley

That’s the powerful conclusion of the catalog essay for “Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival,” the 22nd edition of the Milan Triennial. Running through Sept. 1, the Triennial’s main exhibition, curated by Paola Antonelli, showcases more than 100 projects from the past 30 years that address humanity’s troubled relationship with nature.

The terms “extinction” and “survival” seem contradictory. But while Antonelli, author of the words above, believes that humankind will go the way of the dinosaur, she also hopes that our species can leave behind an intelligent legacy — a survival of sorts.

“What’s broken cannot go back, but forward into something new. So it’s not at all final,” Antonelli said in an interview. “The only thing that I consider final is our own extinction. We have, however, the power to postpone it a bit and make it better.”

This Triennial — the second edition since the event was relaunched in 2016 after a 20-year hiatus — is a dense collection of objects, images, videos and immersive installations. Since 2018, “Broken Nature” — which contains works by designers, architects and artists representing 40 countries — has had a long run-up with salons and symposiums in New York and Milan, introducing and discussing the progress and back stories of projects now on view. The meetings addressed ideas including how to accessibly present complex data and grappled with many aspects of life in the Anthropocene age — today’s geological era, marked by human domination of the environment.

The exhibition and events don’t wear their scholarly influences lightly. They are an opportunity to test new buzzwords like “restorative design,” which considers the natural world as connected to, not separated from, humanity: Restorative designs produce sensitive and efficient social systems and ecosystems, as well as better products.

References to thinkers like Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour or Michael Pollan abound: In the show is a table at which visitors can peruse books by those and other authors, and the dense wall texts require concentrated reading.

Cerebral though it is, the exhibition hits hard. Human impact on the planet is hammered home in the opening gallery, where two large screens show a selection of NASA’s “Images of Change,” before-and-after satellite pictures representing the effects of melting glaciers, urban sprawl and other developments over the past two decades.

On the walls behind the screens is a 100-foot wallpaper mural of colored stripes and symbols called “Room of Change.” Created for the Triennial by Accurat, a data design studio with offices in Milan and New York, the work is a visual representation of many streams of information: world population, disease rates, energy consumption and average temperatures.

The information represented begins in 1000 B.C. and runs into a speculative future ending in 2400, echoing some of the exhibition’s overall aims. “This is a show for citizens; we want them to leave with a sense of the long term,” Antonelli said, “and the sense that complexity is our friend, not our enemy.”

“We also want citizens to leave these galleries having a sense of what they can do in their everyday lives,” she added.

Many less wasteful versions of everyday objects are on view, like the Lia, a biodegradable, flushable pregnancy test made of paper rather than plastic. There are also attractive and clever examples of recycling, including Brooklyn-based textile designer Scott Bodenner’s “Mixtape,” which weaves discarded audio and video tapes into shimmery upholstery fabrics; and a new trainer constructed out of plastic ocean waste, by Adidas and Parley for the Oceans.

In a large display, the Netherlands-based Studio Formafantasma’s “Ore Streams” deals with the issue of electronic waste: discarded smartphones, computers and tablets whose high-value but sometimes toxic components end up in landfills.

The display shows Formafantasma’s office furniture made of repurposed electronic components, as well as a video essay and other documents resulting from the studio’s extensive research into “planned obsolescence,” an idea in commercial design in which objects are engineered to become useless before they wear out.

Simone Farresin, who co-founded Formafantasma with Andrea Trimarchi, said in an interview that artificially limiting a product’s use was design’s “biggest perversion.” Their research indicates that by 2080, because of so much thrown-away metal, more ore will be above the ground than below it.

“Recycling is only a short-term solution,” Farresin said. “There is definitely a need to produce less.” More electronic products should be built to last with replaceable components, his display argues. “We often talk about the positive impact design can have,” Farresin said. “But we should also remember the terrible impact that design has every day.”

The exhibition also includes documentation of back-to-nature projects in progress around the world. “Maldives/Sandbars” shows diagrams and a short video of MIT researchers’ work in directing ocean waves to build sediment and reduce erosion on islands and coastal areas without needing to build ecologically harmful concrete dams.

“Seed Journey,” represented with images, descriptions and glass jars containing grains, is another. In 2016, the art collective Futurefarmers took seeds from northern Europe on a boat to their origins in the Middle East, meeting with farmers, bakers and millers along the way.

One such seed is a variety of Finnish rye not grown since the 1880s. Nine seeds were found and planted; some grew, and the rye is now cultivated by small farmers in Norway in an ongoing urban farming project. “We became a connecting point between communities growing ancient grains,” said Amy Franceschini, who founded Futurefarmers in 1995 and is based in San Francisco.

Faced with reduced biodiversity, Futurefarmers rediscovers and shares long-lost natural grains, which are often more nutritious and tastier than industrialized ones. “Bread baked with this rye tastes like maple syrup, even without sugar,” Franceschini said.

Other parts of the exhibition also explore how humans can cooperate and empathize with each other and with animals. “Bee’s,” by Portuguese designer Susana Soares, is a blown-glass object that takes advantage of bees’ highly developed sense of smell. When a person breathes into the glass, bees inside can diagnose disease or monitor fertility based on pheromones and odors. The eerie silicone sculpture “Sanctuary,” by Australia’s Patricia Piccinini, represents two fictional human-bonobo hybrids blissfully embracing — bonobos, humans’ closest primate relative, resolve conflict through intimate touching rather than violence.

Both wonder and urgency are implicit in “The Great Animal Orchestra,” an immersive piece originally commissioned by the Fondation Cartier in Paris, where it premiered in 2016. Audio material collected by Bernie Krause, the 80-year-old U.S. composer and soundscape ecologist who has recorded natural sounds in remote areas since 1968, is paired with animated visuals created by London-based studio United Visual Artists. Colorful stripes and waves wrap around two walls of a darkened, carpeted room to the sounds of wildlife — the trumpeting of elephants, for instance, or the singing of whales.

In one segment of the sound piece, a California habitat was recorded in intervals between 2004 and 2015. In the first clip, audiences hear a cacophony of chirping birds. The last, however, is nearly silent. “Over 50 percent of the habitats that I’ve recorded are gone now,” Krause said. “And that’s in 50 years. That’s no time at all.”

On opening weekend this month, visitors filled the room, reclining on pillows as they listened to haunting wolf howls or ferocious growls from a jaguar. “The soundscape hits audiences in the gut in ways that no scientific paper alone can do,” Krause said. “That’s why this transformation of scientific material into pieces of art is critically important. We want to reach the widest audience possible,” he said.

If we are in the process of designing a postponed, elegant extinction, we’re all in it together. But Antonelli predicts that conflict between climate change deniers and people like herself who are seeking solutions will become more acute, driven by propaganda and social media. “Those who find it evident that a deep crisis exists will be moved to make it known that the crisis is real,” she said.

“Broken Nature” stresses that design has the ability to shift behavior and how we interact with our world, on a large scale. It can analyze, instruct, repair, protect and redirect.

“I would like people to be aware, be outraged, be activated,” Antonelli said. “I would like them to be inspired by what designers and artists do, and leave with the desire to do more.”

“Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival.”

Through Sept. 1 at La Triennale di Milano design museum in Milan.

This article originally appeared in <a id="a65a93fc-a2c7-4174-9c72-fbf0018a1ff9" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/arts/design/milan-triennial-restorative-design.html">The New York Times</a>.

MILAN — “Our only chance at survival is to design our own beautiful extinction.”

Arguing for an elegant extinction

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Kimberly Bradley

Articles written by the author

Arguing for an elegant extinction