In December 1972, the crew of Apollo 17 snapped a picture of home as they rocketed toward the moon. The Blue Marble has since become the most reproduced image of Earth, the view of our small and distant planet forever etched into our self-imagination. Preoccupied with different ways of seeing the world, and the ideologies and upheavals they reveal, the 2020 Taipei Biennial, conceived by Bruno Latour, Martin Guinard, and Eva Lin under the title “You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet,” proposed a new vantage point for interpreting our place in the universe.
The sentiment of the French environmentalist —“we are not defending nature, we are nature defending itself”—was particularly palpable throughout the exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). Covid-19 has provoked urgent conversations about nature, but are nature feeling the gravity of our own sickness. Moreover, the effects of the diseased and ecologically wounded planet are felt disproportionately by those with the fewest resources. Organized around this central schism, the Biennial reconstructed the museum into a “planetarium,” with five celestial bodies representing the global issues of our era.
