SPOOL

Critical Zones and Thought Exhibitions

Daniel Irrgang — 2025-07-19

This paper discusses the notion of ‘thought exhibition’ proposed by the late Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel at ZKM | Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany) and some of its most central approaches to imagining new relationships to the world we inhabit. The analysis particularly considers the last of the exhibitions developed by Weibel and Latour under this curatorial concept, Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics (2020–22), the conceptual preparation of which the author took part in.

Critical Zones utilized the spatio-aesthetic capacities of an exhibition to test, in the mode of an embodied thought experiment, a relational understanding of the world inhabited and shaped by interdependent lifeforms—a world that only artificially, through Western hegemonic thought and actions, can be separated into somewhat detached spheres of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, where inhabitants of the latter demote the former to resources to be extracted.

This paper discusses the spatio-aesthetic experimentation enabled by the exhibition to challenge such dichotomous separations. It investigates the curatorial concept by focusing on two central works: CZO Space (2020) by Alexandra Arènes & Soheil Hajmirbaba and Flash Point (Timekeeper) (2018) by Sarah Sze. As ‘cosmograms’ (John Tresch, Bruno Latour), both works describe a relationship to a world that is not one of coherence and dominance but that respects its particularities and assemblages.

Re-Representations

Anna Neuhaus — 2025-07-19

This article explores the agency of representations to open up perspectives in more-than-human landscape design processes. It follows and investigates the approach of re-representations—multimodal assemblages that narrate landscapes as zones constituted by specific socio-material processes. Methods of research through and on design are combined: students’ experiments of designing with representations were set up in a landscape architecture design studio at the Technical University Berlin in the context of a deeply changing wetness regime in Lusatia, Germany. These design methods are investigated by synthesizing and comparing them with the aim of reflecting them in a post-humanist, new materialist discourse on the understanding of landscape and critical mapping. The findings concentrate on the most crucial agencies these re-representations have, to reorient design processes and reshape what is understood as landscape design in the shift to more-than-human worlds.

What Slides, Crumbles, Drifts…

Violaine Forsberg Mussault — 2025-07-19

In the urgent context of climate adaptation, enhancing representational and design tools within the landscape discipline is crucial for building a comprehensive understanding of the natural processes driving phenomena in hazardous landscapes. Moreover, the context of the more-than-human paradigm poses new challenges. If we view water, soil, and rocks as lively processes and nonhuman actants—agents with their own agencies and rights—how can mapping practices help us better understand, interpret, and recognize their processes, movements, and behaviors?

Based on an interpretative cartographic technique using LiDAR imagery, this paper introduces a series of cartographic experiments that depict water and rock as dynamic, lively processes. The resulting maps aim to enrich our representations of the forces driving natural hazards and provide a new “language” that enhances our understanding of their multiple agencies.

Multispecies Collages for Marais Wiels

Björn Bracke — 2025-07-19

This paper explores directions for a more-than-human conceptualization of urban space. We present five ‘multispecies collages’ for Marais Wiels (Wiels Marshes) in Brussels. This brownfield, inhabited by a wide range of animal species, has been the subject of various construction plans and debates over the past 20 years. In the article, we will first argue that the existing imaginaries for the site, as propelled by the designers and policymakers, fail to acknowledge its multispecies complexity. Such blindness can be linked to the analytical frameworks and representational methods used by urban design professionals. We will then explore an alternative methodology to read Marais Wiels as a space of (non)human cohabitation through a mapping and collage exercise. In doing so, we use alternative data sources and speculative drawing methods. We will show how these multispecies collages, built around five perspectives, reveal a more relational understanding of the site. We conclude by confronting existing spatial imaginaries with our re-reading of Marais Wiels and reflect on the collages as an attempt to bridge the gap between more-than-human theory and urban design practice.

Interdimensional Representations

Anna Rhodes — 2025-07-19

This visual essay explores the translation of complex environments through representations with attributes that are summarized as ‘interdimensional’. These attributes are not yet elaborated, but the term emphasizes that these representations integrate different dimensions of experiencing and understanding various spatial scales and temporal perspectives. The process of producing these representations requires the Landscape Architect to encounter, investigate, and communicate life, materiality, and processes in an approach that values attentiveness and creativity.

The representations discussed were developed in the context of a design studio at the University of Edinburgh, which was elaborated and led by the author and situated within the Highland Boundary Fault Zone in Scotland. A studio collective, composed of Master’s students in landscape architecture over two years, was encouraged to traverse the fault zone, taking into account social, ecological, and geological fractures, as well as points of tension and upheaval.

Operating from within the ‘critical zone’, the late Bruno Latour’s and his collaborators’ provocation has been adopted: that working from this perspective is necessary to recognize that we humans are ‘living among the living’ (Société d’Objets Cartographiques [SOC], 2018). The author’s, and the design studio’s approach encourages experimental drawing and making to develop ‘ecologically explicit’ landscape architecture—landscape interpretations and design propositions—that foreground and support more-than-human worlds.

Peat, Actor and Design Tool

Anastasiia Soshnikova — 2025-07-19

This essay explores integrating experimental graphic methods into the design process to engage with more-than-human worlds. It is based on the graduation project ‘RE-Peat: Different Futures for the Peat Polders, a Social-Ecological Landscape in the Netherlands,’ which aims to transform degraded peatlands. Through various representation techniques, such as hand-drawn perception drawings and Gaia-graphic representation, peat is positioned as an actor and a design tool. Such methods aim to foster environmental sensitivity and holistic design ideas, acknowledging the needs of both human and non-human actors.

Drifting Space and Unruly Velocities

Aniella Sophie Goldinger — 2025-07-19

This visual essay explores the translation of complex environments through representations with attributes that are summarized as ‘interdimensional’. These attributes are not elaborated yet, but the term emphasizes that these representations integrate different dimensions of experiencing and understanding various spatial scales and temporal perspectives. The process of producing these representations requires the landscape architect to encounter, investigate, and communicate life, materiality, and processes in an approach that appreciates attentiveness and creativity.

The representations discussed were developed in the context of a design studio at the University of Edinburgh that was elaborated and led by the author and situated within the Highland Boundary Fault Zone in Scotland. A studio collective composed of Master’s students in Landscape Architecture over two years has been encouraged to traverse the fault zone, taking into account social, ecological, and geological fractures, as well as points of tension and upheaval.

Operating from within the ‘critical zone’, the provocation of the late Bruno Latour and his collaborators has been adopted: that working from this perspective is necessary to recognize that we humans are ‘living among the living’ (Société d’Objets Cartographiques [SOC] 2018). The design studio’s approach encourages experimental drawing and making to develop ‘ecologically explicit’ landscape architecture—landscape interpretations and design propositions—that foreground and support more-than-human worlds.

Representing the More-than-Human

Anna Neuhaus — 2025-07-19

In the thread Landscape Metropolis, SPOOL addresses the interrelation between urban, infrastructural, rural, and living formations as a dynamic, intertwined, and layered landscape structure. Triggered by the profound changes of the Anthropocene, the complexity of the metropolitan landscape asks for reorientation when addressing physical space as well as spatial investigation and theory, in terms of aesthetic appreciation, designerly concepts, guidelines for planning and governance, and design theoretical understandings. Spatial design responses to this growing complexity cover a broad spectrum of areas. They range from a focus on negotiation processes between human actors and demands—such as approaching the need for inclusivity, accessibility, and democracy in urban spaces (e.g., Landscape Metropolis #5 – Park Politics)—to a technical or ecological systems-oriented focus on managing landscapes, as in landscape ecology.

Further dimensions open when taking a post-humanist view, understanding spaces as animated worlds consisting of a multitude of actors like waters, soils, animals, microbes, plants, and technology, in which humans live entangled, in dependencies with other cohabitants (see, for example, Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016; Latour & Porter, 2017; Tsing, 2012). How can designers and design disciplines reposition their roles toward this more-than-human, and how does it change the alignment of spatial interventions—the processes of designing in landscapes? In this SPOOL issue, Representing the More-Than-Human, we inquire about the role of visual representations in this reorientation: How can drawings—and the act of drawing—mappings—and the act of mapping—exhibitions and the act of exhibiting help to practice this approximation toward what we are part of: the more-than-human?

In doing so, we locate ourselves in a rapidly intensifying scientific and practical field. Spatial-oriented disciplines are increasingly in dialogue with approaches evolving in post-humanism and new materialism. Notions like multispecies ‘making-with’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 55)—highlighting that nothing exists in isolation and everything evolves in dependencies with other entities—or ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett, 2010)—proclaiming material’s agency—are translated to spatial inquiry (see, for example, Katsikis and Muñoz Sanz, 2024). The attention to mappings and their agency in this context is growing. Research and experiments are increasing on what is often called countermappings—as they provide alternative narratives of spaces by countering the ignorance about processes and entities—in this case, the more-than-human. This issue aims to contribute to this current debate by opening a polyphony that addresses multiple landscape-related dimensions—bringing a new focus on the strands that connect to spatial design. For, as discussed in the previous SPOOL issue on representation, the potential of visual representations that are in dialogue with rethinking space is ‘to create awareness, understanding, (…), and, most of all, to move beyond documentation and to inform the process, the focus, and the intention of the spatial design itself’ (Bobbink et al., 2022, p. 1).

The constant reorientation to the contested field of ‘landscape’ is a central concern in spatial theories and practice. In a way, more-than-human entities have been part of this process from the beginning. In spatial plans, entities such as water bodies, meadows, and forests have always been the subject of study and design. In reflecting on how landscapes are represented, however, it becomes clear that landscape-oriented

disciplines are—as are all other disciplines—mainly influenced by anthropocentric mechanisms. The landscape is predominantly understood and designed as the background for human action. More-than-human actors remain objects in drawings, mappings, and plans. Here the transformative potential of more-than-human thinking sets in. For the landscape-related disciplines, this means focusing on the dimension of the more-than-human in the central matter—the landscape—and critically examining where it is to be uncovered and reinvited, as it has been overlooked, simplified, neglected, or suppressed.

With all the potential of visual representations, it is crucial to be critical, as in any transformation process. This offers a spectrum of approaches for reflection, emphasizing that representations of the physical landscape imply making decisions, prioritizing, and directing the focus, constantly arising in power structures and from a way of thinking. Like all other humans, designers will never be ‘innocent’ (Haraway, 1988, p. 597) in the messy realities of our times.

Decisions are also to be made regarding the complexity and accessibility of the representations. There are limitations to what a reader of a drawing can comprehend; should it be understood by experts or a broader audience? The tension between oversimplifying complexities and comprehensibility is also a point of discussion in this issue. The question of decision-making and accessibility is directly related to the political dimension of representing the more-than-human. It is a constant process of negotiating, interpreting, and narrating the interests of humans and more-than-humans and their dependencies. This must be considered to avoid misinterpretation as an apolitical or supposedly neutral approach. The dangers are easy to imagine: ‘The idea of entangled socio-ecological systems ruled by the laws of self-regulation and co-adaptation, with caring, protecting, and respecting as collective ethos, replaces contested interests and political struggle’ (De Block & Vicenzotti, 2018, p. 154).

In this posture—bringing together excitement about the potential of representing the more-than-human and a critical attitude—this issue touches on a spectrum of areas where representations of more-than-human worlds affect spatial design processes, discussing their potentials and limits. The contributions reveal the agency of these representations in a range of areas, from conceptualizing space and landscapes anew to opening new perspectives for design interventions. All contributions can be read as approaches on how to, in this context, address the hyper-complex entanglements of actors, relationships, agencies, and dependencies through representations.

The issue opens with a discussion on Latour’s concept of ‘critical zones’ (Latour & Weibel, 2020) and how this can be approached and developed through different ways of representation. The notion of critical zones, which is groundbreaking in spatializing more-than-human thinking, is discussed in many articles in this issue. It offers a new perspective on the ‘critical’ space that should be taken care of—the ‘porous and permeable layer’, a ‘skin, a varnish, a biofilm’, in which more-than-human actors are in correspondence, constituting it all the time (Arènes et al., 2018, p. 2). Irrgang, co-curator of the critical zone’s exhibition at ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, investigates the potential of ‘thought exhibitions’ and some of its most central approaches to get a grasp on the notion of critical zones and to imagine new relationships to the world we inhabit. These approaches can be interpreted as rethinking landscape and space through representing entangled, more-than-human processes.

Three more articles resonate with this theory and investigate how the concept of critical zones translates into representations related to spatial conception and design processes. Anna Rhodes’ visual essay reflects on various experiments evolving from a design studio, exploring an area in Scotland through understanding it as a specific critical zone, coined by geological forces of deep time. The essay emphasizes the impact of representations in the design processes, which are also brought together in an exhibition format that enables a multifaceted narration. Also in the context of a design studio, Neuhaus and Orduz reflect on a method of matter and process-oriented mapping—rerepresentation—and investigate how it enables design strategies and approaches as recursive and relational processes. Their investigation is located in critical zones focusing on wetness, opening up perspectives on what designing in more-than-human worlds can be. Bobbink and Soshnikova highlight, in correspondence with other mappings, the agency of ‘Gaia-graphies’ (Arènes et al., 2018)—not so much as a method of investigation or communication, but in the first place as a tool to inform innovative design processes. Here the act of drawing—‘drawing’ interdependent relationships as a verb—informs the process, content, and the design’s aims. Moreover, the authors give centre stage to material processes, in this case peat subsidence and growth, and thus engage the soil in the analyzing and designing process.

The following articles engage in the debate from different perspectives that overlap with the previous articles in translating concepts of animated matter. Mussault understands water, soil, and rocks as lively processes. She investigates how mapping can help to recognize and interpret their dynamics and behaviours to enhance their agency to plan and strategize not against but with the forces (Clément, 2014). Likewise, Goldinger discusses the agency of material, here sea ice, by focusing on its melting and drifting character. She uses explorative scenario building and interdisciplinary, multimedia material experimentations to understand the ice as a formative design tool for marine spatial planning. The drawings map the ice on its path from the Siberian nurseries to the melt passage of the Fram Strait as an integral piece of landscape infrastructure. Bracke et al. combine different forms of representations into multispecies collages. With this approach they aim to mobilise various data sources to unravel the interdependent relationships on the site they investigate and include them in discussions about its future with multiple more-than-human actors. These collages aim to create awareness and approachability amongst various (human) stakeholders and, therefore, must be simple and easy to read.

The issue shows a wide range of directions and approaches of representation (e.g., hand-drawn mappings, multidimensional diagrammatic representations, filmic approaches). It discusses how different focuses and methods can bring new ideas and aspects to be involved in more-than-human worlds. Various topics are still open to discussion, such as further investigations into design processes and the spatial implementation of these attempts, e.g., through guidelines or governance approaches. All articles introduce aspects that reflect and enrich design processes, ranging from orienting these processes by giving ideas on how to rethink space through representations (Irrgang) to reflecting on how standard methods of spatial representation are insufficient in meeting these dimensions (e.g., Bobbink). Further, the relationship between tools, and their strengths and limits, is shown. Their different abilities in enabling approachability, complex narrations, or the depth of rethinking epistemologies show a large diversity (compare, e.g., Neuhaus et al.).

All contributions highlight that the authors of representations are and will be the medium through which materials and other actors like flora and fauna get a more dimensional voice and, hopefully, a louder one. The issue can be seen as a contribution at the beginning phase of an evolving discourse which integrates various disciplines and preludes a profound reorientation toward the more-than-human landscapes in spatial disciplines.