The exhibit showcased work from Erica Deeman, Denice Frohman and Olalekan Jeyifous. Channeling inspiration from the land her family farmed in Jamaica before emigrating, Deeman’s “Give Us Back Our Bones” draws viewers into a darkened room. Seeds symbolizing the Black diaspora dangled from biodegradable fishing lines affixed to dock lines on a wooden frame, seemingly encased in plaster molds or fragments from another unnamed work. Light from a projector danced over the shards, casting shadows on the wall. It might have been playing a video, but it was impossible to tell. Bird sounds played with industrial beeps, possibly from marine vessels. Benches near the room’s threshold allowed viewers to reflect on the impending climate crisis. 

The next room housed Frohman’s work, which intimated anti-imperialist sentiments. Usually a poetry performer, Frohman featured a clip from a 2020 documentary about life post-hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, with a woman expressing skepticism about experts altering traditional farming methods in her homeland. Another screen played landscapes with impassioned Spanish narration. Two neon signs hung saying, “Puerto Rico Is Not For Sale,” in Spanish and English adjacent to a blackout poetic piece repurposing The Jones Act, titled, “Our Terms Have Changed,” with an original addendum. The Jones Act is a federal law restricting foreign ships from transporting goods between U.S. ports.

Jeyifous, a Nigerian-born Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist and lecturer at Yale with an architecture degree from Cornell, describes his current work as salvagepunk, though previously has been characterized as an architectural utopianist. Inhabiting the top floor were CGI renders of hypothetical technological adaptations residents of New York might implement after the city is marred by climate change and two 3D-printed models. A circular wooden plaque suspended on a wall displayed a conceptual agricultural calendar. On the opposite side of the room, a VR headset allowed viewers to glimpse Jeyifous’ vision of a unifying railway, similar to Saudi Arabia’s linear smart city, The Line. The 3D-rendered video traveled tracks that start flanked by buildings like a city street, gliding upstate to what Jeyifous calls a “Proto-Farm Community.”

The exhibit was curated by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Pioneer Works’ science scholar, co-founder of The All We Can Save Project and Urban Ocean Lab, and former climate policy advisor for Elizabeth Warren. On Dec. 5, Johnson hosted a discussion featuring Jeyifous and Paola Antonelli, an Italian architect, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design and Director of Research and Development at MoMA. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Simons Foundation sponsored the free event. Aromas from GaMaDiam Goods, a Taiwanese e-concept grocery store, filled the spacious hall, and guests were welcome to tipples.

Environmental defeatism drew at least 350 people, leaving some standing. After a brief preamble from Pioneer Works CEO Mara Manus, their Director of Publishing Joshua Jelly-Schapiro introduced a panel to confront the existential crisis of Anthropocene warming without giving into despair.

“Climate Futurism” was kindled by themes in Johnson’s forthcoming book, “What If We Get It Right,” which attempts to conceptualize humanity embracing a post-climate catastrophe world. “When it comes to climate change, much of our cultural imagery is apocalyptic,” Johnson said, starting the discussion. The science of climate change is confirmed. Now, experts simply report worsening conditions. Most technology essential for a transition to a sustainable future is optimized or within reach. Thus, “This is design’s time to shine,” according to Johnson. She asked the panel when and why they started incorporating sustainability in their practice.

As a child in Italy, Paola recalled reading about a German protesting against the overpackaging of an American cosmetics brand by leaving the excessive packing in the store. So, she was always conscious of environmentalism. Jeyifous, who goes by Lek (pronounced Lake), was also always climate-conscious, though more directly recently. “I’ve always been fascinated less with architecture as a dominion over space, land and environment and more about how it may work as a full, holistic ecosystem between environment, communities, space, program, all of that.”

Lek explained his esoteric work on display upstairs. The two CGI images are agrotech farm inventions. One was a single passenger water and seed drone; the other was a “hover farm” greenhouse. “And obviously, this seems like a very miserable future to be stuck in, right?” Ayana ribbed, indicating the ear-to-ear grins all the subjects in Lek’s work flaunt, later admitting she thought the people were “freaking cool.”

Ayana progressed a slideshow displaying more of Lek’s work conceived in the same world, though not upstairs, described by Lek as oyster and poultry farms revitalizing the train and canal system. According to Aesthetics Wiki, salvagepunk, also referred to as junkpunk or scavenged punk, “is a stylized setting that focuses on technology and culture based on an unusual source: scavenged junk,” often used in post-apocalyptic speculative fiction. 

Readers may be more familiar with cyberpunk, coined in 1980 by writer Bruce Bethke, though many consider William Gibson’s 1984 novel “Neuromancer” as the genre’s defining work. The rushed release of the video game “Cyberpunk,” featuring Keanu Reeves and a laughable menagerie of bugs, recently revived interest. Since “Neuromancer,” genres such as steampunk and, more relevant to Lek’s work, solarpunk also formed. These genres reflect a thematic approach that challenges traditional norms, earning the suffix “punk” without the implications typically affiliated with the music and corresponding subculture or insult, meaning worthless. Ayana also categorized Lek’s style as “proto-utopianism.”

Ayana asked Paola how to “think about [design] as an opportunity to remix things” instead of being driven by new products from virgin materials. Paola expressed a need to stay attuned and connected to life. It should not just be thought of as “perfect Apple products“ but also “crap that is badly designed.” She gestured towards the right-to-repair movement, which has risen as a response to planned obsolescence, a business tactic ironically implemented by Alfred P. Sloan as CEO of GM. To her, people should think of products as a moment in a material’s life cycle they “adopt” it for, referencing a MoMA exhibit called “Life Cycles.”

Paola and Alice Rawsthorn conceived the phrase “design emergency” for their eponymous book, podcast, and Instagram account. They’d always wanted to help people understand the impact of design, for good and bad. During the pandemic, they witnessed its significance in action. She praised designers like Michael Murphy for helping assemble impromptu COVID wards. After the lockdown, Alice and Paola continued pursuing the idea that design is a fundamental factor in any revolution.

“Design emergency” was a less appealing term to Lek, preferring gradual transformations through design, describing his work as “not frantic,” “not pedantic or patronizing …” “This is my dream,” Ayana interjected, “that, like, climate romcoms become a genre: The meet-cute at the neighborhood composting facility,” seizing the moment to remind the audience to demand Mayor Adams keep composting in NYC’s budget plan. “‘Climate solutions need more romance’ is my public platform,” she quipped.

Lek recalled a previous Pioneer Works panel, “The Future of Coastal Cities,” where landscape architect Kate Orff described her response to Hurricane Sandy’s devastation. Initially, she wanted to address redesigning the coastline head-on, later realizing that, actually, coastal communities needed to be engaged in the discussion of how they wanted their city to look. “So in the end,” Ayana asserted, “it was more about people first instead of design first.” Lek wholeheartedly agreed.

Through interviews for her book, Ayana found that many people have trouble envisioning an optimistic scenario despite humanity’s apparent access to available solutions and recent progress in the U.S. From here, the conversation evolved into a philosophical discussion of the dystopian genre. 

Since stories require conflict, Lek remarked, most utopian fiction tends to have elements of dystopia. “Utopia” comes from the Sir Thomas More novel, a satirical critique of 16th-century English society. Pure utopia might be more easily observed in philosophical texts. Aldous Huxley’s “The Island” comes close, but his utopia exists within a bubble. Ayana brought up the Marvel film “Black Panther,” which Kendra Pierre-Louis cited as an example of a “climate utopia” in an essay for Ayana’s book. Lek retorted, “But they had to hide from the colonialists.”

Regarding the importance of policy, Paola said, “I think we can imagine how the future should be, but getting there seems to be insurmountable… maybe,” later mentioning she was more worried about economists and politicians than designers. Later on, Lek also griped about gaps in architectural education regarding restrictive building policies and the importance of breaking through institutionalized silos. 

Ayana shuffled to a slide of Lek’s “Frozen Neighborhoods” MoMA exhibition in 2020 that precurses his current installation. For “Frozen Neighborhoods,” Lek ideates how Brooklyn communities might adapt after hypothetical climate legislation increased transit costs, worsening institutional racism, spotlighting agroforestry, a practice of farming without deforestation. “We were taught that an advanced society has dominion over nature,” Lek said, and agroforestry challenges that idea. Like his “Climate Futurism” work, Lek depicted SciFi technology balanced by verdure.

Ayana juxtaposed these ideas with the architectural work of Vinu Daniels’ “Pirouette House.” Paola explained how Daniels studied with Laurie Baker, who taught the Gandhian principle that every structure should use materials from a 15-mile radius, “and if those materials are trash, then you build with trash.”

For the 2019 Milan Triennial, “Broken Nature,” Paola centered on restorative design. “I was trying to show people that being responsible can be delightful and sensual.” Laypeople appreciate design more in Milan, so she geared it toward regular citizens, featuring “Nanohana Heels” by Hiromi Marissa Ozaki: shoes that would plant seeds of plants that absorb toxic materials from the earth as the wearer walked.

A massive egg-shaped sack with a tree growing from it filled the screen. Paola explained this was Capsula Mundi, a green burial system. The egg mass allowed an individual interred without chemicals to grow into a tree. It inspired some denizens to pursue this form of burial. The last slide from the exhibit showed work from FormaFantasma, Italian designers whose elegant compositions draw attention to some lesser-known malfeasance. The installation featured furniture pieces with video showing their construction from e-waste. “We need so many more art shows like this,” Ayana said.

The panel examined how opening borders and relaxing racial relations would free people’s minds to focus on climate solutions before exploring more of Lek’s work, “ACE/AAP,” for the 2023 Venice Biennale. In “ACE/AAP,” Lek imagines a utopian society, set just over 10 years after Nigeria’s independence, where Africans progress technologically instead of becoming exploited. Lek created renderings for two research facility networks, the African Conservation Effort and All Africa Proto-ports, located around the “African World,” a reimagining of the African diaspora. Viewers get a glimpse of futuristic technologies, like an “algal-drift-pool-suborbital-launch hybrid system” and maglev monorails. Ethiopic 70s jazz scored the room.

In the Q.A., one attendee was concerned about fundraising. Paola clarified that climate-centric design should look like an investment, not a sacrifice. Ayana added that a cultural shift needs to occur and may have gradually started. Another asked if media creators should drastically reduce resources. Ayana warned to keep the perfect from becoming the enemy of the good, “You could go down this rabbit hole of freezing and not making things … Salvagepunk it, maybe, a little bit more.” Lek stressed the importance of simply keeping a climate-conscious mindset. After Ayana debuted a “Climate Oath,” based on the Hippocratic Oath, visitors filed out of the repurposed railroad factory to upbeat music.