A new exhibition, entitled Solar Guerrilla: Constructive Responses to Climate Change, will open July 18, 2019 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The exhibition, which is the first of its kind in the world to address the issue of climate change from the perspective of cities as tools for instigating change, showcases a series of interdisciplinary collaborations with a range of public and private institutions, commercial companies, and professionals from around the world. This includes thirty participants and thirty-five case studies from cities including, among others, New York, Chicago, Copenhagen, Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Masdar and Tel Aviv.
Tel Aviv Museum of Art Director Tania Coen-Uzzielli: “Extreme climate events, which are growing increasingly frequent, are among the most urgent concerns currently faced by our world. The term “climate change” – which refers to the outcomes of both natural forces and human actions – brings together a wide range of environmental, social, political and economic scenarios that point to the severity and extent of this phenomenon. Given the limited amount of time remaining to instigate significant change, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art has sought to contribute to the public discourse on this subject through an exhibition and book.
Solar Guerrilla: Constructive Responses to Climate Change presents new activist developments and innovations in the fields of architecture and design. This project partakes of the museum’s larger commitment, in parallel to both global and local discourses, to exploring our relationship to the environment through a series of projects in the fields of architecture and design, art and craft.”
Efficient solutions to climate change concerns may be found on a local level, where the engagement of urban communities may prove to be effective in combating environmental damage. Cities can serve as laboratories for experimenting with solutions and lively hubs for the generation of new ideas, offering fertile ground for collaborations and initiatives. “Solar Guerrilla: Constructive Responses to Climate Change” addresses an approach involving multiple possibilities for climate-related actions, most notably in the context of individual cities.
The exhibition – and the English-Hebrew language book which is published by Hirmer Publishers – is organized into six thematic chapters/sections, whose titles are borrowed from contemporary discourses prevalent among active architectural firms or utopian architects, city planners and landscape architects, activists and the developers of various apps, the environmental departments of municipalities, technology companies, product designers and science-fictions writers.
Each chapter/section presents a professional approach – social, political, environmental, or technological – which promotes a different relationship with our planet:
- 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius (addressing global warming)
- SolarPunk (offering accessible sources of green and renewable energy to urban populations most in need)
- Sponge City (cutting-edge, sustainable methods for managing potential floods and using the water to promote urban development; methods for creating potable water in arid areas)
- Anti-Smog (strategies designed to reduce, or even eliminate, the emission of polluting gasses that contribute to the creation of smog)
- Sunroof (exploiting solar energy as an efficient substitute for fossil fuels)
- Passive House (voluntary building standard for energy efficiency in a building, neighborhood, district or entire city, which significantly reduces its ecological footprint.)
Cities can serve as laboratories for experimenting with solutions and lively hubs for the generation of new ideas, offering fertile ground for collaborations and initiatives. This project is concerned with cities as tools for instigating change. The exhibition features a range of possible initiatives adapted to specific geographical environments: some of them are currently being implemented in different cities around the world, others will be implemented in the future, and yet others will remain utopian suggestions.
Leading international architectural firms participating include, among others, WOHA (Singapore); Turenscape – Kongjian Yu (China); The Big U (New York and Copenhagen); Third Nature (Copenhagen); and Foster + Partners (London), as well as cooperation with, among others, MIT, the UN Climate Change Secretariat, American science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, American environmentalist Bill McKibben and Israel-based Breezometer and SolarEdge Technologies.