Lecture, 29 October 2026, 18:30 – 2nd Floor North at the Faculty of Architecture

Dehlia Hannah

Dehlia Hannah is a curator and philosopher of nature, currently Associate Professor of Environmental Aesthetics in Art History at the University of Copenhagen. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University, with specialisations in aesthetics and the philosophy of science. Her research and curatorial practice focus on contemporary artistic engagements with emerging science and technology, as well as cultural responses to environmental crisis.

She is editor of the Routledge Handbook of Art and Science and Technology Studies (Routledge, 2021) with Rogers et al., Julian Charrière—Toward No Earthly Pole (Mousse, 2020), Julius von Bismarck—Talking to Thunder (Hatje Cantz, 2019), A Year Without a Winter (Columbia University Press, 2018), and the author of numerous essays and manifestos, including Unseasonal Fashion: A Manifesto (Avery Review, 2016) and ‘Blackout: A Manifesto’ (e-flux Architecture, 2024). Curated exhibitions include Placing the Golden Spike: Landscapes of the Anthropocene (2015), Control: Experiment (2016), Julian Charrière—Controlled Burn (2022) and Troika—Buenavista (2025) and participation in the design team for Terms and Conditions at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Her forthcoming monograph Rewilding the Museum (Hatje Cantz, 2026) considers the museum as a site of restoration ecology and cultural transformation of ideas of nature.
 

Framing Natural Experiments

Events like blackouts, volcanic eruptions, and pandemics offer rare opportunities to observe perturbations in natural and socio-technical systems. By framing such occurrences as “natural experiments” it becomes possible to discover correlations, causal relations, and unexpected affordances of situations that—for practical or ethical reasons—cannot not be provoked deliberately. Without intervening directly, this methodology transforms the world into a patchwork of experimental systems. This talk examines the epistemological and aesthetic implications of such a transformation. Drawing examples from contemporary art and architecture, it elaborates a curatorial methodology grounded in natural experimentation.

Image: Fabian Knecht, Isolation (Eismeer), 2017