Research

  • Sky River
  • GRANTEE
    Marco Ferrari & Elise Misao Hunchuck
    GRANT YEAR
    2022

Marco Ferrari, “The water vapor and aerosols [airborne particles of dust, soot, mold, and bacteria] of Earth's third atmosphere-ocean environment,” 2021. Courtesy the artist

This project evolves current understandings of planetary-scale ecosystems governance and imaginaries through transdisciplinary research methods utilized in architecture and landscape architecture to investigate, assemble, and disseminate multiple histories of the atmosphere. Through research, public presentations, and a print publication, the research examines how the earth’s atmosphere plays a critical role in the construction, regulation, and meditation of the climate—and how climate modification and disaster management might be understood, regulated, and reimagined. This project investigates two sites, one in China and one in Iceland, to understand their mediation of our understanding of the earth’s atmosphere as a means by which to develop alternative cartographies and models of knowledge. In an era where the unpredictability of the climate is shaping geopolitics, the fields of architecture and landscape architecture can play a fundamental role in the intervention of climate disaster management. Ultimately, this work aims to create new tools and imaginaries, intimately tied to unfolding climate changes, for shaping global and local politics.

Marco Ferrari is the cofounder of Studio Folder, an interdisciplinary design practice working on commissions in the fields of culture and the arts, and independent research projects that examine the politics and visualization of spatial data. Since 2012, Studio Folder has been developing visual identities, digital platforms, exhibitions, and art direction consultancy for international clients, while acquiring a comprehensive experience in the creation of information, statistical, and cartographic visualizations for physical spaces, digital, and printed media. The work of the studio has been published widely and exhibited internationally. Ferrari is the coauthor of A Moving Border. Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change, a book based on Studio Folder’s long-term project Italian Limes, published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City in 2019. He is an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and a visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art in London.

Elise Misao Hunchuck is a transdisciplinary researcher, editor, writer, and educator. Based in Berlin and Milan, Hunchuck’s practice brings together architecture, landscape architecture, and media studies to research sites in Canada, Japan, China, and Ukraine. Employing text, images, and cartographies, she documents, studies, and archives the co-constitutive relationships between plants, animals, and minerals—in all of their forms. She is the almanac and journal editor for transmediale and one of the curatorial directors of the yearly digital and media art festival. She is an editorial board member for the journal SCAPEGOAT: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy, an adjunct assistant professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, and alongside Marco Ferrari and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, she coleads the architectural design studio ADS7 at the Royal College of Art in London. Her writing and editorial works have been published in The Funambulist, Flash Art, MIT Press, Onassis Foundation, Spector Books, and Sternberg Press. Most recently, she coedited Electric Brine (Archive Books, 2021), Photography Off the Scale (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and the forthcoming Operational Images (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). Forthcoming written contributions are with Bloomsbury and the Minnesota University Press series Art after Nature on the work and legacy of Robert Smithson.