Back to Earth: 140 Ideas - Introduction

A new mini-podcast series inspired by the publication of 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth, a collaboration between Serpentine and Penguin. Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist & Kostas Stasinopoulos, this book is part of Back to Earth, Serpentine’s long-term project dedicated to the environment and the climate emergency.

Back to Earth invites practitioners to respond to the environmental crisis and in this publication, 140 artists, scientists, architects and more continue this work & come together to create a ‘do-it-yourself’ guide on how to shape a more ecological, equitable future. The result is a compendium of recipes, sketches, photographs, essays, spells, and instructions that ask us to engage with the climate emergency in new and imaginative ways in our own lives.

For this podcast series we’ve invited 5 artists from the book to share their contributions and take us on a journey through actions and thoughts their instructions might inspire. Bhanu Kapil shares instructions for mixed groups of artists, poets, activists and all those working for climate justice, Tomás Saraceno invites us to listen to the spider playing its web at night inside our homes, Cauleen Smith shares advice for urban farmers and a cocktail recipe for colonisers, Maya Lin explores what happens when we surrender our yards back to nature and Nahum invites us to swallow a piece of cloud and travel to outer space.

Back to Earth is curated and produced by Rebecca Lewin, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Lucia Pietroiusti, Jo Paton, Holly Shuttleworth and Kostas Stasinopoulos.

Special thanks to Bettina Korek, CEO of Serpentine, Bloomberg Philanthropies and all the advisors Claude Adjil, Brian Eno, Alice Rawsthorn, Kevin Conroy Scott and Yesomi Umolu for their insightful advice on this book.

This series of five artist episodes is produced by Deborah Shorinde for Reduced Listening, with music from Femi Oriogun-Williams