Metabolic Commons: Against Entropic Zones and the Ecology That War Built.

The frameworks that govern environmental governance and climate policy inherit from Cold War military research, colonial field sites and postwar techno-scientific infrastructures, which shaped both, which questions could be asked, and which were foreclosed. In that lineage, life was progressively reformulated as a thermodynamic process, onto which competition was encoded as an ecological necessity. The ecology that naturalised maximum energy describes an ecosystem and a market economy with identical indifference to what is being maximised, for whom, and at whose expense. This ecology survives in ecosystem services, carbon stocks and natural capital; rearmament and the green transition are being financed at the very same moment. Without critical reflection, the transition reorganises the structure it claims to resolve, shifting the extractive frontier and subsidising itself with reproductive and subsistence labour.

This workshop uses the thermodynamic vocabulary against the grain of its inheritance. An entropic zone is a territory, community or body whose social-ecological reserves have been irreversibly dissipated through extraction, then made to appear as the natural background of accumulation. Capital's metabolism works by networking entropic zones, from Lubumbashi, Wolfsberg, to southern Greenland and the Atacama, joined in a single infrastructure of accumulation.

Co-organised by Rose-Anne Gush and Antonia Majaca, Metabolic Commons: Against Entropic Zones and the Ecology That War Built, taking place on 21-22 September 2026 at Aula Mario Baratto, Ca' Foscari University of Venice.

All details including the full programme, description and abstracts are available in the attachment, and here, via IZK- Institute for Contemporary Art at TU Graz, and NICHE Centre for Environmental Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

There is also an option to follow the sessions online, via Zoom (registration required)​.