Metabolic Futures

Metabolism is the process through which living beings transform materials in order to live. Today, this process extends far beyond the body: it unfolds across farms, factories, laboratories, supply chains, and environments. Precisely because metabolism is so ordinary – woven into the substances and routines of everyday life – it often remains hidden in plain sight. Since 2023, Akademie Schloss Solitude, in collaboration with geographer Maan Barua, has been exploring how these material relations can be made perceptible, thinkable, and open to artistic, scientific, and political inquiry.

Why metabolism, why now? Metabolism names a profound transformation in how life is organized. Animal life has been radically rescaled: domestic livestock, bred for efficiency and profit, now outweigh the biomass of humans on the planet. Industrial reformulation shapes everyday consumption, with ultra-processed foods becoming a dominant source of calories in many parts of the world. At the same time, exposure has become inseparable from living. What enters the body is not limited to nutrients alone: thousands of food-contact chemicals circulate through packaging, additives, and environments, many of which are detectable in human bodies.

Metabolism offers a way of understanding the economy at the level of life itself. Economies do not only produce and circulate goods – they organize what bodies ingest, absorb, tolerate, and pass on. Industrial animal farming turns growth into measurable productivity. Food processing transforms eating into a problem of design. Packaging, preservatives, and additives enable substances to travel and endure, while many of these compounds also appear across medicines, cosmetics, and other everyday products. In this sense, value is generated not only through production but through substitution, standardization, and logistical control – while unevenly distributing chemical exposure and environmental burden.

As both a biological and socio-material concept, metabolism provides a vocabulary for analyzing cities, landscapes, and infrastructures. It traces how resources, energy, waste, and substances circulate through systems shaped by inequality and power. In this perspective, environments are not passive settings but active exposure systems and storage media for industrial residues, where the long history of industrialization continues to shape future life.

If the Anthropocene describes planetary crises at a global scale, metabolism brings that scale down to lived experience: to dose and residue, food chains and labor, regulation, and everyday life. It reveals how power operates through substances, processes, and uneven exposure – and how life itself is reorganized through these dynamics.

The project »Metabolic Futures« positions itself as an interface between society and the economy, science and art. Science makes substances, thresholds, and exposures measurable. The economy organizes these into systems of production, circulation, and profit. Art and the social sciences, however, render these processes perceptible in other ways – through sensation, affect, and experience. They make residues, smells, textures, and bodily sensations tangible and give form to temporal, often intergenerational, consequences that remain invisible in technical or policy language.

Here, art is not illustration but method: a way of making hidden relations perceptible, contestable, and open to transformation. Science is understood as a situated practice of measurement and classification, and the economy as the active organization of the material conditions of life. Metabolism becomes the point where these perspectives intersect.

The Project

»Metabolic Futures« began its public program in April 2025 with a two-day event of workshops, sound walks, discussions, lectures, film screenings, and culinary experiments, organized in cooperation with Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and Raupe Immersatt e.V.

Rather than approaching metabolism abstractly, the program focused on substances themselves – such as palm fat, cocoa, and maltodextrin –as entry points into broader worlds of extraction, processing, regulation, sensation, and exposure. Explored scientifically, sensorially, and performatively, these materials made metabolism tangible as a set of relations connecting bodies, economies, and environments.

In 2026, the project continues with »Metabolic Futures II – The Politics of Smell«, a multidisciplinary event examining smell as a political, social, and economic medium.

Bringing together artists, biologists, and geographers, it investigates how smell shapes social life, how it has been industrialized, and how its management relates to the governance of space. Building on earlier work with substances, this iteration shifts focus toward processes, asking how an elusive sensory phenomenon can be made accessible to artistic, scientific, and political inquiry.