(EVENTS)
THE MULTISPECIES METROPOLIS
A STUDENT DESIGN EXHIBITION
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2023
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.
MATERIALS
PHOTO GALLERY
Set Up
1/10
Entrée
2/10
Discussing “Vermin Architecture”
3/10
“Catscape”
4/10
“Wild Turkey”
5/10
Playing “Off Leashing Pods”
6/10
On “notes for two locked gates”
7/10
Interactive Map
8/10
The Team
9/10
Celebration
10/10
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This event was generously funded by the Wolf Humanities Center, the Department of History and Sociology of Science, and the Center for Experimental Ethnography. We owe a debt of gratitude to all the individuals and collectives who made the exhibition possible, including Aaron Levy; Andrea Goulet; Catherine Turner; Cathryn Dwyre; Claire Zimmerman; David Brownlee; David Toccafondi; Deborah Stewart; Deborah Thomas; the Department of Anthropology; the Department of Fine Arts; Ned Dodington; Emily Moore; Emily Zimmerman; Gabe Miller; Grace Kim-Butler; the Humanities, Urbanism, and Design Initiative; Ioanida Costache; Jamal Elias; Jessica Martucci; Joyce Hwang; Karen M’Closkey; Kate Moore; Kristina Lyons; Matt Neff; the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics Labs; Pamela Horn; the Penn Museum; Peter Bruno; Public Trust (FKA: Slought); Rae Zarate; the Spruce Hill Community Association; Stefan Helmreich; Steven Perez; Susan Ahlborn; Via Bicycle; and the Vitale Media Lab. Especial thanks go to Cicada Chen for creating the banner, Gayoung Lee for photographing the event, Sara Varney for designing our course and exhibition flyers, and Yining Zhu for mapping the projects.