{"id":353,"date":"2025-12-02T00:36:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T05:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ams354-f25\/?p=353"},"modified":"2025-12-02T15:10:27","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T20:10:27","slug":"superflex-and-the-systems-of-climate-imagination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ams354-f25\/2025\/12\/02\/superflex-and-the-systems-of-climate-imagination\/","title":{"rendered":"SUPERFLEX and the Systems of Climate Imagination"},"content":{"rendered":"

SUPERFLEX and the Systems of Climate Imagination<\/strong><\/p>\n

This collection brings together nine works by the Danish artist collective SUPERFLEX, whose practice confronts climate change not through direct messaging, but through disruptions of the everyday worlds and infrastructures that shape contemporary life. SUPERFLEX\u2019s exhibitions, which span a wide range of mediums such as film, installation, public art, architecture, and even participatory performance, reimagine climate change as a condition embedded in systems around us. Systems of power, consumption, and geological time. By transforming familiar spaces and symbols, they invite viewers to imagine climate change not as a distant catastrophe, but as an ongoing <\/span>reconfiguration<\/span><\/i> of the worlds we inhabit.<\/span><\/p>\n

Across their works, SUPERFLEX exposes the instability of systems presumed to be permanent. <\/span>Flooded McDonald\u2019s<\/span><\/i> (2009) showcases a global icon of fast-food capitalism as it fills slowly with water, rendering consumerism vulnerable to environmental collapse. The film demonstrates the ease with which familiar spaces become containers for climate anxiety. Similarly, <\/span>Apr\u00e8s Vous, le D\u00e9luge<\/span><\/i> (2019) marks sea-level rise directly onto a Parisian department store, visualizing a future shoreline within a beacon of capitalist enterprise. These interventions reveal how deeply climate change is entangled with the everyday systems of corporate consumption that define modern life.<\/span><\/p>\n

Other works stretch climate imagination across species and timescales. <\/span>Experience Climate Change As an Animal<\/span><\/i> (2009) displaces human perception entirely, workshops inviting participants to inhabit the perspectives of species facing extinction and displacement under warming conditions. <\/span>Modern Times Forever<\/span><\/i> (2011), a 240-hour film of a building decaying over millennia, reframes climate change through a temporal lens, highlighting the impermanence of modernity. Together, these works challenge anthropocentric approaches to environmental crisis, urging viewers to imagine climate futures from frames far beyond the human.<\/span><\/p>\n

SUPERFLEX also interrogates the institutional and economic systems that shape climate politics. <\/span>Power Toilets<\/span><\/i> (2010\u2013) and <\/span>The Corruption Contract<\/span><\/i> (2009) examine the bureaucratic structures through which authority operates. These exhibitions directly call out how governance, corruption, and exclusivity impede climate action. <\/span>Oil Fountain<\/span><\/i> (2012), created during public scrutiny of Norway\u2019s fossil-fuel industries, materializes the tension between petrochemical industry and its limitations.<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, <\/span>The Nursery Garden<\/span><\/i> (2017) and <\/span>As Close As We Get<\/span><\/i> (2022) propose alternative models of coexistence rooted in traditional ecological knowledge and multispecies urbanism. Rather than imagining climate change only through destruction, these works envision new modes of <\/span>our <\/span><\/i>relation to natural systems, and how we can heal through art. <\/span><\/p>\n

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Flooded McDonalds, 2009<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Flooded McDonald\u2019s<\/span><\/i> was a film by SUPERFLEX released in 2009. They constructed a life-size replica of a McDonald\u2019s in a studio in Bangkok, then filled it with water until it was flooded to the brim, transforming a global symbol of consumerism into a gradual disaster scene. The film echoes declensionist themes that were a response to contemporary world issues: \u201c<\/span>the financial crisis had happened, end-of-the-world rhetoric was circulating, global warming was really kicking in, and Hollywood was making films about all of this.\u201d <\/span>Global warming and capitalism intertwine: the rising water engulfs the architecture of mass production, and in the process SUPERFLEX exposes how the power consumerism becomes fragile under climate catastrophe.<\/span><\/p>\n

An issue of the climate crisis that the film unintentionally brought to light was the role of media and the relatability of imagined, familiar spaces. During a heavy flooding season in Australia, news outlets <\/span>accidentally used a clip from our film, believing it was real footage. SUPERFLEX noted that it \u201creveals the responsibility and ambiguity of creating a one-to-one scale set that viewers can easily imagine themselves in.\u201d Familiar spaces, especially those that are affected by environmental disturbance, become outlets for imagining loss, mourning stability, and narrating climate change through everyday life.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Experience Climate Change As an Animal, 2009<\/span><\/p>\n

Experience Climate Change As an Animal<\/em> (2009) was a series of workshops that began with participants at the Copenhagen climate summit to undergo hypnosis and perceive climate change through the eyes of a cockroach. During the following months they hosted five other hypnosis sessions as other species: eagles, jellyfish, polar bears, mosquitos, and mammoths. SUPERFLEX intentionally selected animals that were \u201c<\/span>either extinct or about to become extinct, or on the contrary carrying dangerous diseases.\u201d The workshops were a unique approach to \u201cimagining climate change,\u201d taking the empathic rhetoric environmental movements employ to the highest degree.The intentional selection of such radically different species highlights how unevenly climate change is felt across the planet, pushing participants to consider a spectrum of ecological experiences\u2014from extinction-level precarity to the spread of disease\u2014and to imagine the crisis from perspectives far beyond the human.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Power Toilets, Ongoing<\/p>\n

As a part of their \u201ctransformation of power\u201d project series, which deals with the flux nature of governmental bodies, economic structures, and shifting social conditions, SUPERFLEX began the <\/span>Power Toilets<\/span><\/i> project in 2010. <\/span>Power Toilets<\/span><\/i> involves creating exact replicas of toilets in corporate, \u201cpowerful\u201d places such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bonn or the Executive Board of the UNESCO headquarters in Paris and making them accessible to the public. SUPERFLEX writes that the work \u201cinvites its users to question the relationship between original and copy, exclusivity and inclusivity, and, ultimately, the infrastructures of power and its everyday manifestations.\u201d The project turns the literal spaces of institutional authority into sites of shared waste, ironically redistributing the power to access and \u201cuse\u201d these global decision-making bodies. By collapsing the distance between elite climate governance and ordinary publics, <\/span>Power Toilets<\/span><\/i> exposes the absurdity of centralized control over environmental futures and imagines a world in which the infrastructures of power\u2014and the waste they produce\u2014are open <\/span>to all.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

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The Corruption Contract, 2009<\/p>\n

Corruption Contract <\/span><\/i>(2009) mimics a formal legal agreement in which SUPERFLEX invites a \u201cclient\u201d to participate in what they describe as activities that \u201cthreaten the stability and security of society, undermine the institutions and values of democracy, ethical values and justice, and jeopardize sustainable development and the rule of law.\u201d Adapted from the United Nations Convention against Corruption, the contract requires the client to \u201cactively be involved in, or solicit others to be involved in, Corruption Activities,\u201d defined to include \u201cbribery, forgery, embezzlement of public funds, bid-rigging, fraudulent bids,\u201d and more. By framing corruption as a bureaucratic obligation, one complete with signatures, obligations, and penalties, SUPERFLEX satirizes the administrative language through which power is maintained. It exposes the absurdity and permeability of systems meant to safeguard democracy amid global crises like climate change, as bureaucratic systems often serve as an impedance to the climate change movement.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Modern Times Forever, 2011<\/span><\/p>\n

Modern Times Forever (2011) is a 240-hour film that imagines the gradual decay of Helsinki\u2019s Stora Enso building over thousands of years. Described as a work that \u201ccollapses notions of time, permanence, and modernity in public urban space,\u201d the film subjects the iconic structure, known locally as \u201cthe sugar cube,\u201d to an accelerated future of erosion. Designed by Alvar Aalto and completed in 1962, the building has been a site of artistic controversy, many describing it as the \u201cugliest building in Finland\u201dwith its modernist architecture style. Viewing the building through a distant temporal lens, SUPERFLEX reframes climate change as a slow, geological process that will outlast current political horizons, asking viewers to confront the fragility of \u201cmodernity\u201d and the inevitability of environmental transformation. It ultimately positions the building as a monument to impermanence, a reminder that even steadfast symbols will erode under the pressures of environmental disaster.<\/p>\n

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Oil Fountain, 2012<\/span><\/p>\n

Oil Fountain (2012)<\/span><\/i>, installed in Haugesund, Norway, presents an oil barrel tipped on its side, suspended as a continuous stream of oil pours from it. The sculpture \u201cappears to achieve the magical feat of being suspended in the air as oil streams from it endlessly,\u201d yet the illusion is \u201cfar less stable than it seems.\u201d SUPERFLEX highlights how oil, \u201ca substance which has consistently fueled corruption and catalysed war and conflict,\u201d continues to define value in petrochemical economies, especially in the situated country of Norway. But \u201cfew things last forever,\u201d they write, and the seemingly eternal flow gestures toward a resource that might be running dry\u201d By staging this tension between abundance and depletion, the work imagines climate change through the temporality of extractive industries. This message becomes clear when viewing the work in the context of the climate change movement, at a time when the oil-dependent industries were being scrutinized and pressures to transition toward renewable energy: fierce national debates over Arctic drilling in Lofoten and the Barents Sea, public criticism of Statoil\u2019s tar sands investments, and growing political concerns about Norway\u2019s \u201coil addiction\u201d amid mounting global climate pressures. <\/span><\/p>\n

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The Nursery Garden, 2017<\/span><\/p>\n

The Nursery Garden (2017) <\/span><\/i>is a public artwork created for hospitals on the French islands of the Indian Ocean. SUPERFLEX writes that \u201cthe project aims to facilitate an exchange of knowledge between different cultures of medicine, challenging the common boundaries between \u2018modern\u2019 and \u2018traditional\u2019 medicine.\u201d In each courtyard, a nursery of medicinal plants \u201cprovides a neutral setting where patients, visitors and hospital staff can take a break, meet each other, learn about botany, join a workshop, or nurture the growing plants.\u201d By elevating local medicinal knowledge and re-centering healing around ecological relationships, the project resonates with broader movements to imagine climate change through traditional and Indigenous modes of understanding: approaches that emphasize interdependence and the restoration of reciprocal ties between humans and their environment. <\/span>The Nursery Garden <\/span><\/i>highlights this need for a synthesis between what is <\/span>modern<\/span><\/i> and what is <\/span>traditional<\/span><\/i>, especially in ecological approach.<\/span><\/p>\n

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As Close As We Get, 2022<\/span><\/p>\n

As Close As We Get (2022) <\/span>is a monumental sculpture that extends from above the water\u2019s surface into the underwater landscape, creating a shared architectural space for both humans and marine life. SUPERFLEX describes the work as part of \u201can open-ended research examining the relationship between humans and other species, proposing a new kind of urbanism that reimagines how we live together.\u201d The piece acknowledges rising seas and the shifting boundaries of habitable space, and serves as a symbol of cohabitation between humans and nonhuman species. It imagines climate change as a catalyst for new forms of multispecies coexistence, and the artistic monument form it takes allows viewers to consider futures in which built environments must adapt to ecological transformation rather than resist it.<\/span><\/p>\n

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In <\/span>Apr\u00e8s Vous, le D\u00e9luge, 2019<\/span><\/p>\n

In <\/span>Apr\u00e8s Vous, le D\u00e9luge (2019), <\/span><\/i>SUPERFLEX installed a thin blue dashed line along the atrium walls of Galeries Lafayette on the Champs Elys\u00e9es in Paris. The work consists of blue tubes lining the building\u2019s atrium. This discontinuous line is an indicator of an invisible border: the height of ocean level rise within the next century as a result of climate change. Similar to their <\/span>Flooded Mcdonalds<\/span><\/i> piece, SUPERFLEX uses the intervention of a familiar space of the department store to highlight the \u201ccause and effect\u201d nature of consumption. A department store is a space defined by the very consumption that threatens the climate. The blue line marks how the climate crisis is \u201crapidly threatening the structures of our quotidian reality,\u201d visualizing a future shoreline inside a temple of consumerism.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Works Cited<\/p>\n

SUPERFLEX. \u201cFlooded McDonald\u2019s (Short Intro).<\/em>\u201d YouTube<\/em>, uploaded by SUPERFLEX, 2009, www.youtube.com\/watch?v=gsJsb2BKBLE<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Austvik, Ole Gunnar, et al. \u201cBP Spill Seeps into Norway\u2019s Arctic Drilling Debate.<\/em>\u201d Reuters<\/em>, 29 July 2010, https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/idUSTRE66S27H<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Solsvik, Terje. \u201cNorway Rejects Greenpeace Appeal Against Statoil Drilling.<\/em>\u201d Reuters<\/em>, 30 May 2014, https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/world\/norway-rejects-greenpeace-appeal-against-statoil-drilling-idUSKBN0EA1HR<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Macalister, Terry. \u201cGas Build-Up Threatens North Sea Oil Rig.<\/em>\u201d The Guardian<\/em>, 27 May 2010, https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/environment\/2010\/may\/27\/north-sea-oil-rig-gas-threat<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Adomaitis, Nerijus. \u201cNorway Environmental Lawsuit Says Arctic Oil Plan Violates Constitution.<\/em>\u201d Reuters<\/em>, 14 Nov. 2017, https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/business\/environment\/norway-environmental-lawsuit-says-arctic-oil-plan-violates-constitution-idUSKBN1DE172<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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