"Gaiagraphie: Critical Zone Mapping"- Lecture by Alexandra Arènes

Borders & Territories Graduation Studio 2025-2026

Lecture Series

"Gaiagraphy: Critical Zone Mapping"

December 10th | 10:30–12:00

Online

About the Speaker

Alexandra Arènes is a French landscape architect, researcher at the University of Manchester, and co-founder of Société d’Objets Cartographiques, that speculates on earth political design. Her practice seeks to develop new visual tools for the Critical Zone by combining field collaboration with geoscientists and the invention of notations that can reshape how designers understand and represent living, chemical, and climatic systems.

Lecture Overview

She lectured on these partnerships and introduced “Gaiagraphy,” a biogeochemical method of planet visualization, in her talk. Gaiagraphy is a cartographic research project that explores how to connect scientific and design ways of knowing and depict an unstable Earth in the Anthropocene. It expands on the concept of the Critical Zone, which is the thin, delicate, livable layer between the sky and the rock that is examined in instrumented observatories and greatly impacted by human activity. To make these mostly undetectable processes and disruptions readable, the project employs mapping. Reversing the typical geological perspective by putting rocks at the edges and soil and atmosphere in the middle of the map is a crucial step. The maps combine a variety of sensors and measurements to illustrate interactions that are difficult for conventional coordinate-based maps to depict.

Check for more: https://gaiagraphie.com/