People

The architect and researcher lives in Milan, where he founded the studio 2050+. He teaches ‘Data Matter’ at London’s Royal College of Art: the course deals with the impact of digital content on reality.

I p p o l i t o Pe s t e l l i n i L a p a r e l l i

S p e c u l a t i v e r e s e a r c h a s a d e s i g n h o r i z o n f o r s a v i n g t h e p l a n e t : t h e a r c h i t e c t a n d c u r a t o r c h o o s e s s c i e n c e f i c t i o n t o n a r r a t e t h e f u t u r e

by Paola Carimati — photos by Anuschka Blommers and Niels Schumm

He’s decidedly an ‘accelerator’, i.e. an expert in `smart technology’ who studies which practices to ‘accelerate’ to counteract the climate crisis. Also due to his unconventional professional skills, the staff of Rotterdam’s Architecture Biennale included him among its participants alongside 2050+, the agile and interdisciplinary planning and speculative research unit launched in 2020, in Milan. “In order to respond to contemporary emergencies, the studio acts in a modality that cuts across technology, politics, visual arts and sustainability”, Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli emphasises. Being in line with his practice, ‘It’s about time’, the 10th edition on show in the Netherlands until 13 November, is thus a platform for discussion, an opportunity for the project community to engage in building an ecologically and socially aware future. Starting with a fundamental book in the history of sustainable culture.

“‘The Limits of growth’, commissioned to MIT by the Club di Roma”, recalls Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, “already in 1972, the year of its publication, warned that exponential economic growth would lead to ecological disasters within a century” unless society could make the necessary adjustments. “Unfortunately, that scenario has come to pass”, notes the architect with a PoliMi degree and a fifteen-year collaboration with the Rem Koolhaas studio, “now each of us is asked to take responsibility and question: what action we can take to radically change the opinions about growth and development?”. The position of his working group is clear: “we are critical of all paradigms that claim degrowth as the only possible alternative to the environmental emergency”.

He explains this in the latest video-installation, ‘Synthetic Cultures’, set in 2072: in the ‘science fiction’ that intertwines scientific data, consumption and actual lifestyles, three avatars reveal what might happen if the consumption of meat from farmed animals were replaced by artificial tissue harvested from stem cells. “Central to the project’s development is a kind of biotechnology already widely tested in the 1970s”, says the architect. “Its use would free up natural resources and infrastructure spread across the country and traditionally devoted to the entire food chain”, a conversion that would result in extraordinary environmental benefits. If only we were able to govern its fallout. Reducing CO2 aside, the hypothesised, radical and possible scenarios seriously speak to the enthusiasm of vegans willing to embrace new lifestyles, to the greed of those seeking to monopolise the new business, and to the scepticism of the ‘no-meat’: “that portion of the population that, resistant to change, considers meat a sacrosanct cultural and religious symbol”. The cyber narrative, much beloved by Pestellini because it allows to clarify what hasn’t manifested yet, declares technology’s neutrality: the moment when it’s implanted into history, the political and ideological states define it.

“I like to recall Salvador Allende’s incredible project at the start of the 1970s, in Chile”, the researcher remembers, “‘Project Cybersyn’ was the prototype for a futuristic ‘control room’, a kind of centralised brain at the service of the community, designed to control and regulate in real time the country’s entire industrial production”. For 50 years man has had the tools to implement solutions in service of the planet, and for 50 years we’ve been waiting for the ‘system’ to make them scalable and therefore usable. “Despite the fact that access to digital platforms, social networks and online gaming is ‘open source’, sharing does have inherent inequalities, forms of domination and undeniable abuses”, a paradox. “The promise behind the launch of the web, of the virtual realities in which we are immersed, and the metaverse — a concept that can be traced back to the pages of the cyberpunk novel ‘Snow crash’, written by Neal Stephenson in 1992 — was very democratic: the internet presented itself to the world as a liberating place. In every way”. Then something changed and free access turned into a means for labour exploitation. Think of delivery drivers, labourers working for large global companies, who despite having contributed to keeping our social factory alive in the lockdown, are still fighting for the full recognition of union rights.

‘Riders not heroes’, the video released by 2050+ last year about the working conditions of delivery riders in Milan, addresses this: “we described the short-circuit the digital world creates when interacting with the systems of accelerated capitalism”. A work that also criticises our inability to govern this widespread and pervasive technology. Let’s continue with ‘Media Archaeology’, the book by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, to remind ourselves that before understanding how a medium works, it’s necessary to understand how it’s made. “Because, beyond the dystopian scenarios of an IT industry that to deliver a new mobile phone every year is forced to extract lithium from the depths of the sea, and which in carbon footprint terms equals the global civil aviation industry, it’s no longer sustainable”, the architect concludes after a video interview lasting over an hour. A necessary exchange of data. —