PRIMORDIAL SOUP
Towards Metabolic Practice

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methodological continuation of Monstrous Earth

We are no longer designing for a stable world. Collapse is not an edge case but the environment we now inhabit. Design must adapt its assumptions to this condition and develop practices for working within ongoing instability — acknowledging that transformation is continuous, that systems exceed our control, and that stability itself is no longer a meaningful ground to design upon.

Premise

Decentering the human is perhaps the most human-centered choice we can ethically make today. In the midst of ever-worsening ecological, political, financial, and affective collapse, imagining livable futures feels increasingly bleak. This isn’t just emotional exhaustion, but a signal of deeper temporal dissonance – of being embedded in planetary systems indifferent to human survival, while inhabiting societies centered on extraction, short-term gain, and ecocidial practices. The combination is particularly cruel: we exist inside inhuman scales we cannot escape, while accelerating our own dissolution within them.

Primordial soup foregrounds this double bind: planetary metabolism that exceeds us and human-made systems that worsen our already-precarious position. It treats collapse as a collision between planetary scales and forms of destructive human organisation. The project asks how we might inhabit and design within this condition, where dissolution and emergence blur, and human narratives of stability and futurity are continually undone.

Preliminary Sketch

Ongoing Threads:

x. What might design become when collapse is the ongoing present, rather than a scenario to avoid or a problem to “solve”?

x. What if resolution can’t be the premise of design, but a contingent outcome of inhabiting collapse differently?

x. How do we orient inside instability if survival depends on continual reconfiguration?

x. How can design hold multiple, non-aligned temporal scales at once, without flattening them into progress?

x. What forms of attention and practice emerge when dissolution and emergence blur into the same movement?