Banquet X’s COOP summit project builds on the shared roots of the banquet, the museum and the theme park. The Orto Botanico dell'Università di Cagliari (Botanical Gardens) is envisaged as a step into a near future ecopark. Researchers predict a substantial rise in the Earth’s overall temperature, within the range of two to four degrees celsius in forthcoming decades. While these metrics may not seem alarming, they will have significant psychological, physiological, ecological and political impact. These can range from extreme heat stress, economic collapse, unbreathable air and food scarcity to the re-emergence of forgone diseases.

If an everyday activity such as a walk in the park already seems mildly uncomfortable under the June sun of 2019, what could be gleaned from transmitting the climate conditions of the near future into the present? Over the course of the COOP the members of the group have immersed themselves in various strands of research on climate change which could best be described using philosopher Anne Françoise Schmid’s terminology of the “Integrative Object”. This implies that contemporary complex objects of research such as climate change ought to be approached as a “kind of unknown 'X' whose properties are distributed in an unprecedented

way between different disciplinary forms of knowledge”. The banquet and the theme park provide strong historically embedded templates for spatial design and social interaction. This multi-project event maps the X of climate change onto the conceptual templates of banquets and theme parks to engage with the materials, imaginal space, aggregated knowledge and forecasts that emerge from its research. This produces an encounter in which the main attraction of the park is a navigation through different perspectives and layers of knowledge creating a synergy between scientific and artistic competencies.

Text written by Edel O’Reilly, Samantha McCulloch, Bassam El Baroni, Cagliari (Sardiania) June 2019. As part of DAI COOP Summit 2019