DESIGN EARTH: Elephant in the Room and Other Creatures — Intensive Workshop

DESIGN EARTH's latest project is a series of fables that addresses the elephant in the room—the climate crisis—by animating charismatic figures from natural history museums. This design research identifies and leverages figures from the collections all while unsettling the museum apparatus—the devices, archives, histories, and audiences. Some such figures include a taxidermy of an African matriarch elephant, the skeleton of a stranded blue whale, and a composite structure of a Diplodocus carnegii. The fragmentary remains of such creatures are animated, brought back to life, so to speak in rhyming verse, colorful imagery, and with some poignant humor. These speculative afterlives stir up potent trouble on the breath-taking capture of life in the Anthropocene to ask how cultural institutions may be responsible to calls for decolonisation and decarbonisation. In Singapore, this hands-on, participatory workshop will focus on the cultural prehistory, present, and speculative futures of the Singapore saltwater (estuarine) crocodile and the Malayan tiger. Facilitated by Rania Ghosn, El Hadi Jazairy, and DESIGN EARTH team member Kelly Koh. Beginning with the Artist Talk on 13 June, participants will engage in DESIGN EARTH creative methodologies including site visits and the building of a research archive while looking into the facts and fictions of these creatures and their homes.

INTENSIVE WORKSHOP SESSIONS

The Hall, NTU CCA Singapore
6 Lock Rd, #01-09/10 Gillman Barracks 108934

Workshop participants are required to attend the Artist Talk, Geostories, on Friday, 13 June, 6.00 – 8.30pm. Please register here.

Saturday, 14 June 2025
12:00 – 6:30 pm

This session includes visits to Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum and Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve. Workshop ends at 5 pm at Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve. Transport will be provided from and back to NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.

Monday to Wednesday, 16–18 June 2025
6:30 – 8:30 pm

Attendance on Saturday and Wednesday (14 and 18 June) sessions is mandatory. Please do not register if you cannot attend one of these sessions.

Attendance on Monday and Tuesday (16 and 17 June) sessions is optional.

This workshop is FREE for all participants. A refundable deposit of $25 is requested to book a slot. To qualify for a cancellation refund, you must cancel your reservation by 11 June, 12pm. For those who can commit, the deposit will be returned upon attendance of the events.

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This programme is part of the exhibition Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate at ADM Gallery 2, NTU School of Art, Design and Media.

Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate springs from the conviction that climate change demands urgent transformations in the ways we care for and design the Earth. DESIGN EARTH, a research practice founded and led by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy engages the medium of the speculative architectural project to make public the climate crisis. This work is often developed simultaneously through the medium of drawing and the creation of books, two of which are excerpted and put in conversation in this art exhibition. Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (Actar Publishers, 2018) is a manifesto for environmental imagination in twelve architectural projects engaging the planetary scale through drawing divided by the organising principles of Aquarium, Terrarium, and Planetarium. This exhibition highlights three chapters from the larger work: After Oil, 2016, Pacific Aquarium, 2016, and Cosmorama, 2018. The Planet After Geoengineering (Actar Publishers, 2021) is a graphic novel which imagines the worlds of climate modification technologies and their controversies. Together these projects help us begin to consider and address the open question: how (else) could we tell the story of the Earth?

Curated by Dr. Karin G. Oen, Director, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; Senior Lecturer and Head of Art History, NTU School of Humanities

Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate is co-organised by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and ADM Gallery

More information here.

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Image: A Tiger and a Crocodile that were hunted down. Lim Kheng Chye Collection. Courtesy of National Archives of Singapore