Swissnex launched Swissnex for the Planet in 2024 to explore and rethink how humans coexist with the more-than-human world and what it would take to build more balanced relationships across species and systems.
To make this more tangible, we created a space where these conversations can happen and where challenges are examined at a planetary scale: the Planetary Embassy.
Traditionally, diplomacy is the management of relationships between countries but what if diplomacy also had to account for the relationships we maintain with the non-human world ecosystems, species, rivers, soils, and the living systems that make life possible?
The Planetary Embassy comes alive through a series of pop-up experiences across the Swissnex network, platforms for dialogue, experimentation, and unexpected encounters.
The Planetary Embassy China is our flagship initiative: a pop-up part cultural festival, part intellectual salon, part lively café, where we prototype what we call planetary diplomacy. We ask bold, practical questions like: What if a tree could join climate negotiations? What if rivers, glaciers, or forests had their own delegates? What if international agreements had to be approved not only by nations, but by the ecosystems they affect?
Architecture as planetary dialogue
At the heart of the Embassy stands Cabanon 2050, an architectural prototype developed through a collaboration between the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI) and Zhejiang University (ZJU).
Designed and built by students and professional architects across cultures and geographies, the structure explores sustainable construction, climate-responsive design, energy transitions, and resilient urban living. Neither model nor monument, it is a speculative prototype, a place to gather, reflect, and test ideas about how cities might coexist with the climates and ecosystems that sustain them.
Here, architecture becomes a language of planetary diplomacy. The pavilion is conceived not only for human use, but with climate, materials, energy flows, and more-than-human life in mind inviting us to see buildings as participants in planetary systems rather than isolated objects.
Imagining Planetary Diplomacy — Art and science in conversation
Alongside the Cabanon is the art–science exhibition Imagining Planetary Diplomacy. The works presented have been selected through an international open call aimed at the younger generation under 30, and the exhibition will be complemented by works from local artists. Through art installations, research-based projects, and imaginative activities it explores the questions like: What would it mean to create diplomatic systems that represent more than just humans? How can we build institutions and relationships that promote mutual care between humans and the more-than-human world?
A program of encounter, exchange, and practice
The Planetary Embassy comes fully alive when we bring people together through an intensive public engagement program of talks, workshops, performances, and informal gatherings.
Students meet scientists. Architects talk with policymakers. Knowledge circulates as dialogue, open, evolving, and relational.
Through these encounters, the Planetary Embassy becomes a living laboratory for planetary diplomacy, where ideas are tested in public and across disciplines.
Initiated by Swissnex and developed in collaboration with partners in China, it affirms a commitment to openness, a diversity of perspectives, and shared responsibility for our planetary futures. By combining architecture, art, and public exchange, the Planetary Embassy expands diplomacy beyond nations across disciplines, species, and generations.
The Planetary Embassy comes alive through a series of pop-up experiences across the Swissnex network. Weaving together research, technology, indigenous knowledge, and the arts, the program invites you, from Climate Week NYC to COP30 in the Amazon, to imagine a "planetary diplomacy" that reaches across species, time scales, and natural forces, helping us negotiate our place within a more-than-human world.
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