VALERIO FRANZONE / KOOZ It is fascinating how Energies spans time with historical and newly commissioned artworks, geographies, scales and different forms of expression — from art to architecture, activism to technology. Can you introduce the exhibition, its urgencies and its methodology?

STEFANIE HESSLER Energies started with a piece of East Village history. In the 1970s, a group of unhoused people and recent graduates from architecture, urban planning, and engineering programs refurbished a building on 519 East 11th St with their own hands and were subsequently able to acquire it for a meager sum thanks to a city founding program. In a time marked by the oil crisis, many couldn't afford electricity; with continuous power outages, they installed solar panels and a wind turbine on the roof of the building, accompanied by insulation efforts. The group started generating more electricity than needed, so they fed the surplus energy back to the grid. ConEdison responded with a lawsuit, feeling their energy monopoly was threatened: few people generated electricity decentrally and independently at the time. The group received help from Ramsey Clark, a former United States Attorney General, and won the lawsuit. However, the consequences were more significant: a group member was invited to congressional hearings that discussed changes to energy regulations, helping in 1978 create a new regulatory framework known as PURPA or the Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act. This regulation, which is still active today, allows people to co-produce energy, decentralise the system, and compel energy companies to buy the energy produced by independent providers at a price fixed by the court. Swiss Institute is located in the East Village, four blocks from the 519 building. When I arrived here, I began researching the neighbourhood's history in conjunction with environmental housing and social justice activism and found out about this incredible story. I started digging deeper and found people who were involved and who are around and active today. That's how Energies started.

KOOZ So, how did these specific social events evolve in an art exhibition?

SH This history from the 1970s is inspiring because it is marked by the need to rethink how we live and work together and with the environment. Consequently, the exhibition proposes a model of engaging various registers of collective thinking about the environment and ecology, housing, gentrification, energy, and extraction. It is also about intersectionality, which, back then, wasn't a term commonly used. All this created such an inspiring model, which started from a humble run-down building in this neighborhood and helped shift energy regulation in the entire country — a colossal change. It is crucial to how much we can learn from looking back. So, for example, Joar Nango, an artist and architect of Sami descent researching his people's history and architecture, produced an installation following how communities built windows out of fish stomachs, a translucent material letting light in but keeping the cold out. Such an approach to looking back to ancestral or Indigenous technologies and practices is vital to reimagining our present and dream and work toward our future. For the exhibition, we produced several new commissions and gathered existing artworks that look at energy, expanding this local history in the East Village globally and thinking about their connections to the Global South. For example, Jean Katambayi Mukendi, an artist living in Lubumbashi, creates lamp drawings made with different materials sourced in Lubumbashi and installations with metals like copper, which is locally extracted for the production of green technologies in the Global North, while impacting the environment and social structures in the Global South.

KOOZ Tackling processes of extraction is fundamental to addressing the environmental crisis. We need to understand local social and environmental implications, and we cannot continue to make it clean here by making it dirty there.

SH Exactly. When we talk about green technology, adding complexity through different histories is essential. The exhibition is affirmative of changing how we relate, produce, and consume resources, including energy. That’s how those solar panels and wind turbines in the 70s inspired the exhibition. Still, we must also look at how inequities in the Global South derive from materials extraction that feed the green energy revolution and the Global North in general. We must look at local contexts and how they are always connected and entangled in a much broader, planetary web of relations, many of which are uneven and unfair.

KOOZ The first thing entering the exhibition is a wall designed by New Affiliates, displaying an archive the Institute developed with the help of Studio Folder. It is a strong manifesto of memory, materials, and resources. Can you tell us about it?

SH As you mentioned, the wall was made by New Affiliates. It is called Drywall is Forever II, and it was built with pieces from different drywalls that New Affiliates sourced from other exhibitions that were closing in the city when we were installing Energies. You can still see some of the exhibition labels with the curators' and the artists' names from the Whitney Biennial and the scars of how the walls were broken into pieces and reassembled. The work reflects on repurposing material and commenting on consumption in a city where temporary exhibitions continuously open and close and walls are built and then taken down. It's a proposal on how to rethink architecture. There is a cutout in the centre of the wall and in the hole is a fan, a sculpture by the artist Nick Raffel, who works with very light balsa wood to create structures whose movement indicates the gallery’s airflows or lack thereof in the vein of institutional critique. We invited Studio Folder to visually organise the archive we assembled from the various people involved in the wind turbine and solar panel initiative; they helped us design the layout of these different objects on the wall. Finally, they also designed the paper pamphlet, another of the Energies exhibition’s resources.

KOOZ I am interested in understanding Energies' role in tackling the climate crisis as a discourse within contemporary art and its speculative and operative role in the broader societal context.

SH Energies is speculative and, at the same time, also looks at the operative changes artists and art institutions could make. This exhibition is a continuation of the work we've been doing at Swiss Institute about climate change, always with the understanding that many issues need to be tackled intersectionally. We don’t have all the solutions, but we need to engage in a process that will change how we do things. It has been more than two years that we've been hosting conversations and inviting projects with artists that reimagine how we can, as an institution, reduce our negative climate impact. We started with Spora, which is still on display and in process. Helen Mirra made a score that proposes that whenever we repaint the interstitial space of the building, we only use leftover paint. Jenna Sutela created compost for us, fed by the SI’s team food leftovers, which produces energy for a speaker transmitting oracle messages on the Institute’s rooftop. So, Energies continues this approach.

KOOZ This speculative and operative approach that you have, as well as the system of connections you are building, opens up a lot of questions regarding city governance. Did you receive feedback on Energies from any city representative?

SH We look for such connections to happen and invite a wide roster of people. The exhibition has an extensive public program, which offers a discursive element and brings audiences into the conversation. In doing so, we hope that the interdisciplinary exhibition, which also speaks to architecture, design, participation, governance, and environmentalism, reaches a broader audience.

KOOZ The exhibition starts with a local historical fact of community activism for energy self-determination. It presents a work by Becky Howland, cofounder of ABC No Rio, and includes independent exhibitions at various local institutions that have been a fundamental infrastructure shaping activism and community engagement within the East Village and the Lower East Side. Even if this area has been gentrified a lot in the last decades, there are still a lot of enclaves with a persistent historical community. Can you tell me more about the aim of Swiss Institute and Energies in establishing a relationship with the neighbourhood and its people?

SH When I began thinking about the exhibition and researching in the neighbourhood, starting with the 11th Street wind turbine and solar panels, I also wanted to pay attention to the other institutions and organisations, activists, organisers, artists, and the people who've been active in the neighbourhood. Loisaida, Inc. organised Ecolibrium, an exhibition connected with Energies that is a “Community Science and Environmental Literacy program and initiative”, as they describe it. Then there is the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, many community gardens in the neighbourhood, ABC No Rio, which is waiting for its new sustainable building to be built, the Lower East Side Ecology Center, another site of the exhibition, and many others. The work they've been doing through the decades is incredible. They are important parts of the story we are narrating, and year after year, work on these important issues from different perspectives.

KOOZ Participation through social and environmental engagement contributed to making this community.

SH Yes, there are incredible people living in this neighbourhood who have been community organisers and activists for so long. This area has many community gardens; they are on empty lots that the community reclaimed after the buildings burned down. They ensure that there is still a sense of community in the neighbourhood. Even if the city constantly changes, the East Village still feels different from other neighbourhoods. So, taking inspiration from 519 East 11th Street and the collective efforts that made these huge changes possible, it was crucial for the exhibition to have a collective logic; I worked closely with my team on making the exhibition. With Alison Coplan, KJ Abudu, Clara Prat-Gay, and the various contributions of other institutions in the neighbourhood, we reached out to many stakeholders in the neighbourhood. We asked them if they wanted to contribute or be involved and what form of involvement would interest them. It was a process of close collaboration and conversation with the various contributors over the years. We want to contribute to the work that we find vital and worthwhile, which is upholding the community in this neighbourhood.

KOOZ How does the exhibition address the issue of how the climate crisis primarily affects us according to class, race, and gender?

SH So, I already mentioned Jean Katambayi Mukendi’s work. Similarly, we are showing Ximena Garrido-Lecca’s two-channel video installation she filmed in Cerro de Pasco in Peru, which is one of the most contaminated places on the planet due to the extraction of zinc, silver, etc, to power green energies, in the Global North. Also, we commissioned a new work to Gabriella Torres-Ferrer, for which they traveled to their native Puerto Rico. There, they installed cameras at four sites still affected by Hurricane Maria from 2017, transmitting live footage here at the SI. When power outages happen, which is still very frequent, the screens in the exhibition go dark. This live stream is connected to the life conditions depending on the energy infrastructure in Puerto Rico. Of course, you remember back in the day, Donald Trump refused help to Puerto Rico, using the colonial and imperialist logic of distance to say that these islands are far away. However, that distance has hardly ever hindered colonial intentionality regarding extraction, military interventions, etc.

KOOZ Can you talk about the Energies Symposium and public programmes connected to the exhibition? How do these appointments — community and education workshops, lectures, panels, and performances — organised at the SI and different places in the neighbourhood connect to the physical exhibition?

SH The symposium and public programme are organised around the exhibition and have different focus points on energy and its social, political, and environmental implications. They happen at the Swiss Institute and our partner organisation.

At St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, we replanted a rose bush that Gordon Matta-Clark planted in 1972, which is interesting not least because he is commonly known as an artist practicing as a sort of iconoclastic architect. In 1976, he also proposed to the Guggenheim Foundation to create a Youth and Resource Center for Environmental Education in the Lower East Side. As part of the exhibition, we replanted the rose bush and then activated it with a dance performance and poetry readings in partnership with the Danspace Project and The Poetry Project. At Anthology Film Archives, we organised a screening of films by Rosa Barba, Monira Al Qadiri, Nina Canell and Robin Watkins, Allora & Calzadilla and various other artists looking at energy. Then, there are several lectures, including by art historian Caroline A. Jones about the history of 519 East 11th Street and Robert Smithson. There’s a conversation between curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and artist Agnieszka Kurant, who did an installation on a door here at the SI. Every time someone opens the door, the expended kinetic energy is transformed into electrical energy stored in a device attached to the wall. It's a comment on labour, in this case performed by visitors. Agnieszka has done a lot of work on labor and emergent forms of social and technological development and the conversation with Christov-Bakargiev will bring their respective research. There is a conversation about green colonialism and energy with a group of researchers including Caleb Wellum, Myles Lennon, and Tsema Igharas and a panel with various inhabitants who lived at 519 East 11th Street. Finally, there are tours of the building and a new Otobong Nkanga mural we commissioned for the site in close dialogue with the residents. We asked the current residents what they wanted us to do there in connection to the exhibition, and they asked for artwork for the building. Nkanga has been thinking about extraction, energy, and community in the context of Nigeria and the global entanglements of extraction. The mural will be on long-term view at the building.

KOOZ What is the long-term agenda of Swiss Institute about social, environmental, and political issues, and how does Energies participate in it?

SH We've been working with the entire team on rethinking how an institution can work regarding climate change, and we're continuing to take that very seriously. We developed an 8x8 plan, which means looking at eight different areas within the organisation: transportation, energy, waste, community, how to support workers and other items. It's a holistic approach spanning from labour to environmentalism. As we go along, we’ll update our goals and make adjustments. This plan is public, so you can access it online to see what we have done and committed to doing going forward. It's a plan with an operative and an artistic side, as in Spora. We apply those areas and goals also to the exhibitions; also as we are moving towards questions of technology in the coming years. Again, those areas are not disconnected but intertwined. In Energies, sharing ideas, resources and interconnectedness is beautifully exemplified by Haroon Mirza’s solar panel installation on our rooftop terrace. They generate electricity for a sound piece by the artist and for Ash Arder's piece, a fridge with a key made from butter. Butter is a material that would typically melt with solar energy, but rethinking our relationships to energy requires collective action and may achieve combined results.

Bios

Stefanie Hessler is the Director of Swiss Institute New York. Her work centers artists and ideas through new commissions, transdisciplinary collaborations, and experimental formats. At SI, Hessler co-curated Spora, which invites artists to transform the institution through “environmental institutional critique,” solo shows by Raven Chacon, Ali Cherri, and Lap-See Lam, as well as the East Village-wide exhibition Energies. Other recent and forthcoming exhibitions include Elevation 1049: Energies, Gstaad; Counterpublic 2026, St. Louis; Parcours, Art Basel; Sex Ecologies, Kunsthall Trondheim; the 17th Momenta Biennale, Montreal; Rising Tides, Gropius Bau, Berlin; Joan Jonas, Ocean Space, Venice; and the 6th Athens Biennale. Hessler is the author of Prospecting Ocean (MIT Press) and has edited over a dozen volumes. She was named among Apollo’s 40 under 40 and ArtReview’s Power 100.

Valerio Franzone is Managing Editor at KoozArch. He is a Ph.D. architect (IUAV Venezia) and the director of the architectural design and research studio OCHAP | Office for Cohabitation Processes. OCHAP focuses on the built environment and the relationships between natural and artificial systems, investigating architecture’s role, limits, and potential to explore possible cohabitation typologies and strategies at multiple scales. He has been a founding partner of 2A+P and 2A+P Architettura. His projects have been awarded in international competitions and shown in several exhibitions, such as the International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. His projects and texts appear in magazines like Domus, Abitare, Volume, and AD Architectural Design.