Clima Fitness is an exhibition, a gym, and a year-long program that considers planetarity and the human body’s capacity to negotiate, mutate, and adapt in the context of climate change.
The project, organized by Intermediae Matadero, was initiated by curator Maite Borjabad and Common Accounts, evolving from their 2019 essay “Planet Fitness.”
The exhibition is populated with a fleet of devices—a new, vehicular installation from Common Accounts also titled “Planet Fitness”—which presents the show’s artistic cargo. The exhibition features the work of artists Faysal Altunbozar, Itziar Barrio, Ibiye Camp, Irati Inoriza, and Mary Maggic.
Read the full curatorial text at this link.
“In the context of the climate crisis, the human species is having to resort to adaptive practices that imply a radical reconfiguration of the body and everyday life. Used in biology to describe a species’ capacity to adjust to climate change, the idea climate fitness is being appropriated by popular culture to refer to the physical and mental preparation needed to face the possible catastrophic consequences of environmental collapse. This is the case put forward in the essay Planet Fitness by Common Accounts, upon which this exhibition elaborates. From cosmetics that seek to protect the skin from the effects of pollution to communities of “survivors” undergoing training to withstand the potential collapse of society, to diets that enhance individual and planetary health, new forms of adaptability are being explored that imply a profound redefinition of the relationship between the body and its environment. Adaptability is not just an individual practice, but rather a tool with which to question the social and economic structures that have led us to the climate crisis in the first place. Therefore, any redefinition of adaptability cannot occur in a political and social vacuum.”
Maite Borjabad
Curator of Clima Fitness
This project holds up a mirror to the current moment and materializes currents of cultural and political imagination. Common Accounts’ installation engages in conversation with the diverse artwork it hosts, and comprises a fleet of vehicles in a performative environment. Its various parts render a preoccupation with the body as a site for design intervention, adaptation, ingenuity, and labour. The vehicles stem from an interest in parades, processions, and rituals: historically important venues for rendering visible political subject matter of public concern.
The installation that structures Clima Fitness is working out. It is composed of adaptable devices engaged in exercise themselves—rehearsing the movements of pulling, pushing, lifting, rolling, rotating—in support of artistic cargo which similarly considers the body in relation to planetarity and environment.
It is of some significance that this exhibition is hosted in a former slaughterhouse, an architectural typology that historically necessitated and innovated technologies for material preservation, like air conditioning, to preserve the organic matter that these kinds of spaces were tasked with housing. Slaughterhouses are also where conveyor belt technologies developed; these were mechanical systems that would eventually lead to the invention of fitness instruments like the treadmill. The conditioning of the environment and the conditioning of bodies were dual functions managed in spaces like this.
Links:
Ianko Lopez profiles Clima Fitness in El Pais
“Getting Fit in the Anthropocene.” Interview with the Architectural League of New York
Clima Fitness featured in Metalocus
Maite Borjabad www.maiteborjabad.com
Clima Fitness, Intermediae, Matadero Madrid
