The Shape of Planetary Governance

​We invite you to The Shape of Planetary Governance, a one-day exhibition and gathering in Zürich on 22 November. It celebrates the launch of the Planetary Compendium—an evolving wunderkammer of planetary governance. This living archive maps the shifting architectures, imaginaries, and experiments shaping how life on Earth may be organized, sustained, and represented.

​In Zürich, the Compendium takes material form through an immersive installation featuring all ten case studies. Visitors are invited to move through a series of multimedia encounters that make visible the entangled infrastructures of our planetary condition. The evening will also feature a multispecies listening room, hosted by sound artist and Compendium collaborator Nithin Shamsuddin.

​Co-developed by Berggruen Institute and Dark Matter Labs, the Compendium brings together historic precedents, emerging experiments, and speculative futures to trace pathways that include the planetary.  New and existing entanglements—legal, ecological, technological, spiritual, and beyond—describe our shared condition. This joint initiative invites thinkers and practitioners alike to analyze, sense, and design within the planetary and its extended entanglements as a lived reality. 

​Designed as a civic and pedagogical tool, the Compendium highlights and diagnoses planetary conditions with ways to solve them. Each case is a window into the infrastructures that shape our collective future: from lunar governance and rights of nature to the ethics of geoengineering, transboundary risk mitigation, and interspecies communication. The case studies document and provoke pathways that detail and reimagine practices in a planetary era. 

​Together, the Berggruen Institute and Dark Matter Labs trace the slow emergence of a planetary civics, an unfinished language for governing a living planet that is fully embedded, incorporates the more-than-human, and remains ethically conscious of our entanglements.