Q&A: Curator Paola Antonelli Takes a Surprisingly Optimistic Look at Human Extinction

The prognosis does not look good.Paola Antonelli will tell you, with a provocative lack of sentimentality, that climate change, collapsing ecosystems, and other effects of human activity on the environment will eventually, inevitably, render the Earth uninhabitable—for people, at least. And at this year’s Triennale di Milano, Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design and director of research and development at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, organized an exhibition that emerges from a humble, clear-eyed acceptance that humans have irreversibly authored our own extinction.