220 - Design Earth (with Rania Ghosn)

Cultures of Energy

Cymene and Dominic recap last week’s Petrocultures Los Angeles conference and discuss the new climate lawsuit filed in France seeking to press criminal charges against the CEO and directors of the French oil major TotalEnergies. Then (15:27) we welcome the brilliant and megatalented Rania Ghosn to the podcast. We start with the work of Design Earth, Rania’s practice together with El Hadi Jazairy and how the collaboration began. Rania explains how Design Earth seeks to explore how design can help respond to the climate crisis and why they tend to work in a narrative or speculative mode. We discuss their strategies for cultivating what she calls “geostories” at the intersection of art, science and design. From there we move to talking about what energy means in the context of design, how the ruins of carbon modernity will haunt urbanism and landscapes for many years to come, speculative ecofeminist storytelling, and the art of making exquisite corpses. We close talking about what it means to inherit the world in all its crisis and how to learn to live in a time of collapse.