A "climate capsule" outside the Museum of Arts and Crafts (Image: MKG)

If there’s one thing Germany is good at apart from beer (and there are a few things), it’s museums. They might not be free like in the UK, but they are often of exceptional quality. After all, Germans take education, or Bildung as it is reverently referred to, very seriously, and museum visits are considered indispensable in acquiring it. That’s why Germany has a course of study at University level called Museumspädagogik, or “museum education,” offering training on how to bring visitors closer to the works they come into contact with.

And if that isn’t enough to convince you, just look at Berlin, a city with an actual “museum island;” it’s not called that after just one museum, oh no, but after six – yes, that’s right – six of the things. Or there’s Düsseldorf with its K20 and K21 which, between them, essentially tell the whole story of modern western art from the Impressionists onwards. Hamburg, too, is not doing badly on the museum front. Not only does it have the world’s largest model railway, but also the creative Museum für Kunst & Gewerbe – the Museum of Arts and Crafts – home to a variety of interesting exhibitions in recent years, including a side-splitting excursion into the works of Germany’s most beloved comedy genius, Loriot.

At the moment, though, the MKG is going in a more serious direction, taking a look at the effects of climate change on the way we live. Titled Klimakapseln or “climate capsules,” the premise for the exhibition is simple: what if climate change can no longer be stopped? How will humans adapt to a changed world?

And the central motif is the capsule, the protective bubble, with curator Friedrich von Borries, himself a designer, asking young designers and artists for both practical and theoretical work: what kind of capsules will humans build to protect themselves from an increasingly hostile outside environment?

The results are fascinating, ranging from imagined futuristic contraptions to concrete designs that have already been built and are simply waiting to be used. There’s the capsule-home, for example, a self-servicing house-on-legs built by Danish designers that collects solar power to heat or cool itself and can move from place to place in search of unspoiled natural resources. If water shortages become as common as predicted, this kind of mobile accommodation might be a life-saver in some parts of the world.

Jouji Hikawa, a Japanese fashion designer, takes the idea of the capsule into clothing, producing an anti-heat suit for use in Tokyo, whose summers are currently predicted to regularly bring temperatures around 50⁰C by 2020. The Perspex head-gear may look like something out of a Stanley Kubrik movie, but it’s been designed with a deadly serious purpose.

Finnish artist Ilkka Halso encapsulating nature (MKG)

This is another fascinating part of the exhibition, in fact: many of the less practical, more artistic works on show interact with science fiction, which of course relies heavily on the image of the capsule. After all, how else can humans exist in the roaring vacuum of space?

Indeed, the recurring use of space-exploration and sci-fi themes is what gives this exhibition its disturbing power. Capsules have been conceived both by space research organizations and science fiction writers as ways of helping humans to survive temporarily in hostile external conditions; now, we are being forced to take the same basic idea and apply it to our own planet. Ilkka Hals, a Finnish artist, has produced some particularly tragic images of trees being encapsulated; reminiscent of a last desperate attempt to salvage the natural world man is so intent on ravaging.

By far the most powerful work on show, however, is, as far as I’m concerned, a video installation piece called “Shrink.” In it, a performance artist is shrink-wrapped in a plastic pouch, being given an air-tube to keep him breathing whilst the rest of the air in the pouch is sucked out. The film goes for about five minutes, in which time a range of associations sweep across your mind.

Like almost all capsules, this one is dependent for its existence on materials which are carbon emitters: in this case, plastics. The irony is, of course, that climate capsules are intended to protect their inhabitants from the effects of over-usage of these materials. Furthermore, the slightly sexual nature of the video – we hear the subject gasping for air, see his flesh being pressed against shiny plastic in a slightly fetishistic fashion – reminds us how humans have an irresistible attraction to the objects that are destroying us: think of the way in which cars and planes are often seen as objects of beauty.

"Shrink" by Malstaf, a distubring visual analysis of the capsule (MKG)

The though-train of association goes on: consumer society shrink-wraps products to make them last longer, just as humans are now working on preserving themselves. Therefore, humans are now a product like any other: and it this kind of raw capitalism that is laying waste to the planet. As these thoughts go through your mind, you hear the gasps for air and feel the claustrophobia: a capsule may protect, but it imprisons; it may conserve its inhabitants, but it suffocates them too.

By the time you leave the museum, you’ll be determined not to let climate change go so far as to make capsules necessary: and you don’t even need one of these German “museum pedagogues” to get that far – the works and the way they are juxtaposed is more than enough for you to get the message.