RICHARD FADOK

Students in my seminar-studio “Space/Power/Species” curated a one-night, pop-up exhibition, The Multispecies Metropolis. The goal of this event – the final assignment in the course – was to use the speculative design projects that they had developed over the semester to stage a larger dialogue around multispecies justice and the built environment. And that they did: By the end of the evening, nearly one hundred members of the University of Pennsylvania community passed through Dean’s Alley, our gallery space.

For three weeks leading up to the event, we read scholarship on the display of animals, consulted with experts in exhibition design and museum studies, and deliberated over the organizational principles that would ultimately guide our layout, including questions of access, interactivity, and affect. The final product was the result of a collaborative process. I wrote the introduction, based on students’ reflections on the semester’s key themes, and I also handled logistics and publicity. Students wrote object labels, arranged the space, and produced the multi-media artifacts that grounded the showcase, from hand-drawn sketches and digital renderings of more-than-human spaces to wood, ceramic, and resin models, virtual reality simulations, and even a tabletop game that invited players to role-play as nonhuman co-habitants. You can read more about the various projects at The Expanded Environment, the Ecological Design Collective, and in my article in Teaching and Learning Anthropology.