Untooling: Carbon Flux Shanghai 2024

Against the backdrop of a grand national movement of emission reduction and carbon storage, the artists engaged with practitioners and researchers working in the related areas while traversing the artificial wetland on east Chongming Island, a Smart Farming Experiment Site in Qingpu, an organic farming base, textile factories staging as green metabolisms in Hangzhou and an ecological village infused in ancient Chinese Dao idealism. knowbotiq started immersing into the multi-faceted narratives around carbon emissions and carbon footprints. The carbon flux issue is not merely about climate crisis but raises questions about planetary imaginations, non-human kinship and travels into geological time scales. In order to receive some answers on such complex issues knowbotiq invited the encountered people after the field trip to draw 1 or 2 cards out of the Untooling: Carbon Flux desk and thus provide here an assembly of potential answers.

Untooling, a project started together with artist Uriel Orlow and political philosopher Ines Kleesattel in 2021, is a speculative and open-ended set of questions and reflections that emerge out of an engagement with the conditions and processes of translocal artistic research. Working on projects in relational contexts, sensitive environments and non/human assemblies, Untooling tries to trace, activate and negotiate translocal entanglements and some of the constellations and pitfalls of such encounters.