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Terrazas | There must be limits to growth

Mexican artist and architect Eduardo Terrazas (b. 1936) presents his video installation – inspired by the atomic bomb – depicting exponential growth in an endless mirror room. “There must be limits to growth. That is also what we see in the climate changes”, he says. The work “Exponential Growth” is a video-animated installation made in 2014. One idea behind the installation came, according to Terrazas, from the atom bomb and the computer technology developing the bomb in the 1930ies. But the work was also inspired by a book project: Eduardo Terrazas (b. 1936 in Mexico) is an architect, urban planner, designer and artist. In 1975, Eduardo Terrazas was asked to conceive a publication and organize an exhibition to accompany and illustrate the meeting of the Club of Rome, an international interdisciplinary think tank founded in 1968. The idea was to study and analyze the future challenges faced by humanity. The task included creating visual material that would help make the Club of Rome’s reports both intelligible and eloquent. The result was a publication entitled ‘Solidarity for Peace and Development’ containing graphics, concepts, images, and photographs that picture the “predicament of mankind” as described in the two reports: The Limits to Growth (1972) and Mankind at the Turning Point (1974), along with a survey of the historical development of the world and its situation at that time. A selection of the material was produced independently and shown at the exhibition entitled ‘Everything Depends on Everything: Exponential Growth, Organic Growth’ and the ‘Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States.’ The rule governing the representation of ‘Exponential Growth’ is a series of sixteen panels (acrylic on canvas) 60×60 cm, starting with a total white square that, through adding exponential black lines, eventually is transformed into a black square. This illustrates an unsustainable process of growth. In a single block, the design clearly exemplifies one of the Club of Rome main messages, namely that the world needs to establish limits to growth. Jakob Fenger interviewed Eduardo Terrazas in Mexico City in February 2022.


Foto di Tiago Bandeira

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