Look around you! Everything that meets the eye has left a void. Everything you rely on in your everyday physical environment takes part in an operation that translates mountains into gravel, forests into clay pits, and villages into sand mines. Everything you touch was once in touch with another environment.

Today, the building and construction sectors account for 39% of total carbon emissions and 40% of global waste output. Digging, demolition, and dumping are the rules of this zero-sum game, where the habitability of some always entails the inhabitability of others, altering ecosystems into areas unfit to sustain life.

The exhibition project Commission on Circularity operates at the nexus of documentation and recommendation. On one front, it gathers world-leading researchers, artists, curators, and designers to construct an archive exploring ways of making the material economies of architecture visible via tangible objects, models, cartographies, concepts, and narratives. A sequence of events comprising witness statements from experts will perform, unfold and extend the archive during the exhibition period.

Moreover, Commission on Circularity invites a series of prominent Danish architects to propose new circular legislation during a series of assemblies occurring from June to September, creating a temporary space for exploring law as a site of design. Here, the methods of architecture will be reconsidered, and the fabric of governance rewoven with the ethos of circularity and the expertise of architectural practice, giving rise to a new legal lexicon for shaping a new societal architecture.

About the Exhibition

TEAM: Søren Nørkjær Bang, Valeria Granillo, Ida Willadsen Bang Kjeldsen, Alexandra W. Emelianov / Event program: Søren Nørkjær Bang / Director: Josephine Michau

CONTRIBUTORS: Global Extraction Observatory, Amelyn Ng, Marija Maric & Francelle Cane, Nina Canell, Countdown 2030, Ang Li, Materia Prima, Metasitu, Beauty of Oil, Jonathan Foote, Ecology of Stone, Lendager Group, Margarida Waco, Students from the Royal Danish Academy.

LEGISLATIVE PROPOSALS: Justine Bell (Djernes & Bell), Anders Lendager (Lendager Group), Søren Nielsen (Vandkunsten), Anna Marie Exner (Anna Mette Exner Arkitektur), Sinus Lynge (Effekt), Pil Thielst (Lundgaard & Tranberg)