Biodiversity Jenga is a six-meter tower of 33 stacked ecosystem dioramas built by 📝Benjamin Von Wong for COP16, the United Nations Biodiversity Conference held in Cali, Colombia, in October 2024.
Each hollow wooden block contains a diorama of one of 12 distinct Colombian ecosystems, from tropical jungle to kelp forest, inhabited by tiny animal sculptures crafted by 200 students from Cali's Luis Madina and Santa Librada schools. Sculptures of three children by Colombian artist Raizha Guzman sit at the top. More than 250 people worked on the piece, which is deliberately stacked to look like it is teetering on the edge of collapse — the game's logic turned ecological warning: pull out enough blocks and the whole tower falls.
After the conference, the tower moved to its permanent home in Cali's botanical gardens, where the community that built it can keep visiting it. According to Von Wong's studio, the work generated 1.2 billion impressions.
If we continue pulling blocks out and destroying them, then we run the chance of actually hitting a tipping point of no return.