Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani

Metakosmia

Metakosmia, 4K, 2 channel video installation, 2024
Metakosmia - Sonification, Media Installation, 2024

Metakosmia is about the survival of a teenage girl in the near future in an environment that has become uninhabitable due to extreme weather phenomena.
The narrative perspective is that of an ant, observing the girl, who lives alone at Biosphere 2, an artificial habitat in the Arizona desert. Biosphere 2 is a giant greenhouse, built in 1991 with the purpose of creating a self-sustainable ecosystem independent of the outside world. Eight visionary artists and scientists experimented with living in this artificial biotope for two years to prove that life in a closed system is possible in the long term. The spectacular project, whose investors hoped would provide insights into human survival on lunar or martian bases, was considered a failure at the time because carbon dioxide levels rose unexpectedly high.
Today, scientists of the Arizona University are conducting research on climate resilience at Biosphere 2, as our society is facing significant impacts from climate change. Fischer & el Sani are interested in Biosphere 2 for its role today, in the age of the 6th Great Mass Extinction, as a pilot program for survival on Earth itself, and not, as the media communicated 30 years ago, as an experiment for extraterrestrial life. In doing so, they contextualize Lynn Margulis' concept of Symbiogenesis, Steward Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, Buckminster Fuller's Manual for Spaceship Earth, Donna Haraway's Posthumanism, and Bruno Latour's Terrestrial Manifesto, among others.
In addition to a two-channel video installation, a fictional narrative of a future in which survival is only possible under glass domes, Fischer & el Sani show the sonification of a drought experiment in the rainforest biome of Biosphere 2, in which climate justice is demanded by nature itself.
The sonification is based on a data set from the University of Arizona and the international B2 WALD Campaign (Water, Atmosphere, and Life Dynamics), which aimed to fully track, from molecules to the ecosystem, mechanisms driving the fate of carbon and water in forest systems under drought.
Metakosmia has been realised in 2023 on occasion during Fischer & el Sani's fellowship at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. The work has been co-funded by Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V. and Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg.