Exit, from Fondation Cartier, Paris: drifting towards disaster

The installation EXIT, from the Fondation Cartier in Paris, offers an overview of stresses affecting the world today.

EXIT, an installationfrom the Fondation Cartier in Paris.

The installation EXIT, coming to Sydney from the , attempts to offer an overview of a number of concurrent and related stresses affecting the world today, and especially their critical acceleration in recent years. It begins with a video projection, down the end of a short corridor, of Paul Virilio, a French philosopher and writer, walking towards us along a seemingly endless esplanade somewhere in the Mediterranean, and talking about the population upheavals in the world today, leading to increasing and irreversible social instability.

The world has always known migration: much of history, especially over the longer view, is about the movements of peoples, bringing with them languages, religions, culture and technology — or sometimes barbarism and brutality. It was the flow of the Indo-European peoples into Europe, Iran and India, for example, that created an immense network of related peoples and languages in the early millennia of civilised life.

After the fall of Rome, Germanic peoples swept into Britain and France, overwhelming and intermarrying with the Celts; not long afterwards the Arabs came out of the desert and invaded Phoenicia, Palestine, Egypt and North Africa, subjugating their native inhabitants.

EXIT uses video images, maps, text and statistics to examine population and climate change.

Centuries later the Turks came from the east and occupied what is now Turkey as well as other lands, in turn conquering the Arabs. And centuries later again, the European nations colonised much of the undeveloped world and populated the Americas and Australia, soon vastly outnumbering their indigenous inhabitants.

Even more recently migration has been vital to the lives, the economies and the cultures of many nations. In Australia alone, we have seen a population that was almost entirely Anglo-Celtic transformed first by the migration of Mediterranean and Balkan peoples after World War II, and then more recently by arrivals from East and Southeast Asia. Most of these people have been assimilated into an expanding idea of what it means to be Australian. There have been more difficulties recently with Middle Eastern migration because it has coincided with the rise of pernicious Islamist bigotry.

But what Virilio is evoking is a phenomenon on an altogether different scale. He claims that 36 million people were displaced, for one reason or another, in 2008 alone; and perhaps extrapolating from this, he asserts that a billion people, equivalent to one in seven of the world’s population, will be displaced in the course of this century. There has never been movement on this scale, not least because — and this is something the exhibition rather skirts over — we have never had such a vast and clearly unsustainable population on the planet.

Virilio makes his point quite effectively, and has a few memorable sound bites, more catchy in French than in English — “la meteo devient plus importante que la geo” (meteorology becomes more important than geography) — but he does not give any idea of what, if anything, might be done about these challenges.

Perhaps surprisingly, he does not clearly distinguish between those who are thriving, at least for now, and those who are suffering in the new globalised world. Both the Brexit vote and the recent American election have reminded us of the gulf between the cosmopolitan, educated and often smug prosperous classes and the forgotten working class whose jobs have been made obsolete.

Inside, the main section of the exhibition is a sort of curved diorama on which changing projections combine images, maps, text and statistics to convey some idea of the reasons for these vast population displacements. The installation begins with the recall of earth’s population but, as already observed, without adequately dwelling on its relatively recent and dramatic increase over the past century or so. Instead the entire sweep of the diorama is covered in tiny pixels and we are informed that each of these stands for 1000 people.

We then learn that 2007 was the year that, for the first time, more than half of the world’s population lived in cities. Urban life, incidentally, is meant to lead to a lower birthrate, but for the foreseeable future the most populous cities will continue to grow because of continued migration from rural areas. We are shown tabulations of the 50 cities with the biggest populations, and counters run up alarmingly in predictions of population growth over the rest of this century. The pixels we began with, now coloured, are used to illustrate the rush of people moving from country to city.

EXIT is on display at the University of NSW Galleries.

Apart from the immense economic and ecological consequences of these monstrous conurbations of poor people, how can ideals of humanism or even simple humanity be maintained in conditions of such impersonal multitudes and such stifling crowding? And of course many of these poor countries have no jobs, so large numbers migrate for economic reasons to places where they can make money and send funds back to keep their families alive.

Consequently the next section is about economic migration of workers to countries including the US, Britain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as on a smaller scale to Canada, Australia and other places.

The money earned by these guest workers contributes a significant amount to their home economies.

All of the people considered so far have proper documents and work permits. Next there is the question of refugees, displaced people and irregular migrants of every kind. Starting from the year 2000, we are shown successive trouble spots and a rising counter of the numbers of people displaced.

Then, after an overview of the past few years, we are taken back to 1990 and follow in more detail the eruption of violence and unrest in countries all across the world, with coloured pixels illustrating the flow of people displaced and fleeing to neighbouring territories.

It is rather like a rapid revision of the various outbreaks of ethnic, political and sectarian insanity that have torn apart communities in what are inevitably already poor and mostly backward societies. From Burundi and Rwanda to Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Eritrea — and then, thanks to the fiasco of the Arab Spring and the savagery of the Islamic State, not helped by ill-conceived western interventions in the region, catastrophic violence throughout most of the Muslim world.

This is the point, at the beginning of the current decade, that the flow of displaced people — the rush of coloured pixels like a front on a weather map — begins to move towards ­Europe. And in that very short space of time we have already seen the damage that has been done to European political life, the frightening rise in extremist and populist movements, their xenophobia and racism unthinkingly ­fuelled by government tolerance of uncontrolled immigration.

But as well as sociopolitical disasters, there are environmental ones. We are told that 26 million people have been displaced by storms, droughts and earthquakes since 2008. And at this point, considering that the effects of these natural events are felt more acutely in poor than in rich countries, a striking realignment of the equator is imagined to convey the contrast between so-called north and south economies: Europe, North America, Japan, Australia and South Africa constitute this notional north, and the rest is consigned to the south.

The figures for climate change may be at the upper end of current predictions, but they are certainly alarming.

An increase in global temperature of 3.5C is predicted by the end of the century, and with this a rise in sea level of around a metre over the same period — due both to melting icecaps and to the thermal expansion of seawater at higher global temperatures.

Such a rise in sea levels poses serious threats to a great many cities around the world, and to illustrate this dramatically, we see a list of names of cities that suddenly, and with a loud splash, fall below a water line. But then, considering that cities in more prosperous countries will be able to take measures against the rising sea — the Dutch have lived with the problem for centuries and Amsterdam’s airport is several metres below sea level — the names of these cities float up above the waterline again, leaving the poorer cities bobbing underwater. As many of these cities are the very ones whose populations we saw skyrocketing earlier, the consequences of their inundation will be grave.

Almost more depressing is the following segment on deforestation. The greatest surviving wild forest areas are inevitably in poor countries that fail to exercise adequate control over the selfish and shortsighted behaviour of businesses and uneducated peasants alike.

Vast areas of African, South American and Indonesian jungle are destroyed every year by loggers and clearers. With the environmental degradation that follows, these countries are slowly committing suicide, but in the short term they are also destroying the livelihood of small pockets of indigenous peoples who inhabit these forests.

And it is here that the installation concludes with a consideration of the cultural losses that follow from population displacements but specifically from the destruction of sensitive ecosystems such as forests. There are apparently about 2700 endangered languages on the planet, of which 230 have effectively disappeared since 1950. The problem is that many of the smaller languages never had a great many speakers: in another statistic, we are told there are about 6700 languages in the world, but 96 per cent of them are spoken by only 3 per cent of the world’s population.

The loss of minor tribal languages may seem a trivial problem compared to the gigantic scale of those evoked earlier, but it brings us back to essential values of humanity that are threatened, as already mentioned, not only by crisis and displacement, but by the expansion of a voracious human population which threatens to destroy the environment that sustains it, and even before that point, already seems to be compromising the conditions in which culture can flourish.

And this is where our capacity to respond to the challenges that face us is hampered by a fundamental misunderstanding of priorities.

The population explosion is a catastrophe in itself, and only China had the foresight to do something about it.

But our addiction to economic growth in the modern world compounds the problem of population, and our addiction to ever-increasing consumption compounds it yet again.

The question of threatened languages reminds us that what is really important is not consumption but consciousness. We may not be able to save a tribal language spoken by a dozen people in the Amazonian rainforest, but we need to reorient our values, and thus our politics and economics, to a goal that is higher than endless bloated consumption, with its inevitable consequences of environmental destruction.

With a low-consumption model — and yet simultaneously a technologically innovative one — we would have a greater chance of achieving a degree of equity in the international sharing of resources, and of mitigating some of the geopolitical causes of international instability.

EXIT: Diller Scofidio + Renfro

UNSW Galleries, until March 25