Page 24 - "he 2020 Guggenheim issue of World of Art Contemporary Art Magazine

Installation View: Countryside, The Future, Photo: David Heald © Solomon R.
Guggenheim Foundation; Image: Laurian Ghinitoiu courtesy AMO
at territorial scale. Such acts, proposed and effected by refugees; Chinese villages focused on a form of twenty-
various political regimes, are profiled, from dictatorship to first-century rural life; and innovation and development in
democracy. Case studies include a prototype of nineteenth- Southern Kenya. As Koolhaas notes in the exhibition text:
century commune, efforts to recondition the landscape ’’As soon as we leave the urban condition behind us, we
of the Soviet Union in the twentieth century, and a food confront newness and the profoundly unfamiliar. What
security program put into effect in Oatar in 2017. we collect here is evidence of new thinking-in China, in
As Koolhaas notes in the exhibition text: ’’Driven by need, Kenya, in Germany, France, and Italy, in the US: new ways of
ambition, ideology, and new political structures all through planning, new ways of exploring, new ways of acting with
the twentieth century, a number of massive proposals media, new ways of owning, paying, renting, new ways of
for radical redesigns transformed large sections of the welcoming, new ways in which the countryside is inhabited
globe. Authoritarian and democratic states alike took today.”
colossal risks attempting to increase productivity and food
security, and remake society. Success or failure, famine, or Level 5: Nature /Preservation
overproduction... We live in a world still deeply marked by Featured on ramp 5 are complex case studies that
these Promethean efforts.” counter accepted notions of nature through the lens of
its preservation: in Uganda, the unintended consequences
Level4: (Re-)Population of conservation success with the mountain gorilla; in
This section considers the countryside as a frontier for Siberia, the global and local impact of thawing permafrost;
experimentation. A carousel of photographic evidence, in Patagonia, large-scale land acquisitions by wealthy
paired with firsthand texts and stories by and from locals, individuals and private conservation organizations.
it presents a panoramic view of new social structures from As Koolhaas notes in the exhibition text: ”Since Rachel
China, Africa, Europe, and the US. Among the examples Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), 15% of the Earth’s surface
featured are European villages revitalized by welcoming has been preserved, but much more will be needed to

24 WORLD of ART