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Talma Gotteiner

Tel Aviv Museum of Art: Solar Guerrilla - Constructive Responses to Climate Change


Hi there,

I am happy to share with you some information about a new exhibition at the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art entitled "Solar Guerrilla: Constructive Responses to Climate Change". The exhibition, is the first of its kind in the world to address the issue of climate change from the perspective of cities as tools for instigating change.

Solar Guerrilla: Constructive Responses to Climate Change

Exhibition curator: Maya Vinitsky, Design and Architecture Department

July 18, 2019 – December 15, 2019

The exhibition showcases a series of interdisciplinary collaborations with a range of public and private institutions, commercial companies, and professionals from around the world. Thirty participants and thirty-five case studies from cities including, among others, New York, Chicago, Copenhagen, Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Masdar and Tel Aviv are included.

Tel-Aviv Museum of Art "Solar Guerrilla: Constructive Responses to Climate Change"

The BIG U (2014- onwards). The Big U is a multifaceted flood-protection project that provides additional benefits such as recreation, public health, clean air, stormwater management, access to the waterfront, and additional transportation options. The flood barrier is a living berm that will create additional green and recreational space while providing enhanced access to the waterfront instead of cutting people off from the water, as traditional flood protection often does. This form of protection will not only reduce disaster risk and improve resilience, but will also enhance the natural and built environment of the shoreline. Credit: The BIG U ©Rebuildbydesign.org, Design and Development: Team led by the Bjarke Ingels Group, 2014.

Tel Aviv Museum of Art Director Tania Coen-Uzzielli: “Extreme climate events, which are growing increasingly frequent, are among the most urgent concerns currently faced by our world. The term “climate change” – which refers to the outcomes of both natural forces and human actions – brings together a wide range of environmental, social, political and economic scenarios that point to the severity and extent of this phenomenon. Given the limited amount of time remaining to instigate significant change, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art has sought to contribute to the public discourse on this subject through an exhibition and book.

Solar Guerrilla: Constructive Responses to Climate Change presents new activist developments and innovations in the fields of architecture and design. This project partakes of the museum’s larger commitment, in parallel to both global and local discourses, to exploring our relationship to the environment through a series of projects in the fields of architecture and design, art and craft.”

Efficient solutions to climate change concerns may be found on a local level, where the engagement of urban communities may prove to be effective in combating environmental damage. Cities can serve as laboratories for experimenting with solutions, generation of new ideas, offering fertile ground for collaborations and initiatives. “Solar Guerrilla: Constructive Responses to Climate Change” addresses an approach involving numerous possibilities for climate-related actions, most notably in the context of individual cities.

The exhibition – and the English-Hebrew book published by Hirmer Publishers – is organized into six thematic chapters, whose titles are borrowed from contemporary topics prevalent among active architectural firms or utopian architects, city planners and landscape architects, activists and the developers of various apps, the environmental departments of municipalities, technology companies, product designers and science-fictions writers.

Tel-Aviv Museum of Art "Solar Guerrilla: Constructive Responses to Climate Change"

Warka Tower: Every Drop Counts (2012 – onwards) Warka Tower (WT) is an alternative water source for rural populations that face challenges in accessing potable water. WT is first and foremost an architecture project: a vertical structure designed to collect water from the atmosphere, gathering rain and harvesting fog and dew. The objective is to provide on average 26.4 gallons of drinking water every day. Using a passive system and simple tools, WT is designed to be owned and operated by the villagers themselves. Ownership of such a tower can be life changing for a rural community, impacting the fields of education, the economy, society, agriculture, the environment and hygiene. Credit: ©Warka Water Inc.

Each chapter presents a professional aspect – social, political, environmental, or technological that promotes a different relationship with our planet:

  • 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius - addressing global warming

  • SolarPunk - offering accessible sources of green and renewable energy to most in need urban populations

  • Sponge City - cutting-edge, sustainable methods for managing potential floods and using the water to promote urban development; methods for creating potable water in arid areas

  • Anti-Smog - strategies designed to reduce, or even eliminate, the emission of polluting gasses that contribute to the creation of smog.

  • Sunroof - exploiting solar energy as a productive substitute for fossil fuels.

  • Passive House - a voluntary building standard for energy efficiency in a building, neighborhood, district or entire city that significantly reduces the ecological footprint.

This project is concerned with cities as tools for instigating change. The exhibition features a range of possible initiatives adapted to specific geographical environments: some that are currently being implemented and others that may or may not be implemented in the future.

Leading international architectural firms participating include, among others, WOHA (Singapore); Turenscape – Kongjian Yu (China); The Big U (New York and Copenhagen); Third Nature (Copenhagen); and Foster + Partners (London), as well as cooperation with, among others, MIT, the UN Climate Change Secretariat, American science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, American environmentalist Bill McKibben and Israel-based Breezometer and SolarEdge Technologies.

Best, Talma

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