Cultures of Regeneration
New Lecture Series Organized by MoA Member Lucy Norris Starts on 2 May
Poster Lecture Series 2024, Photo: Charlotte Linton. Copyright: Matters of Activity.
Rapidly increasing socio-ecological damage and the urgent need for care, repair and recovery has led to renewed calls for regenerative design as a means of wayfinding towards new forms of just and sustainable life on earth, prompting critical questions concerning the reconfigured pasts they invoke to the possible futures they open up. Aiming to (re)design the way we live to support the functioning of natural ecosystems, regenerative systems thinking is being applied to fundamental fields of human activity, from food production and agriculture to textiles, architecture, rural revival and the urban built environment to other-worldy materialities. As a situated practice, regenerative design is also aligned with building community and networking diverse local actors to self-organise and experiment with new ways of making and being.
However, regenerative movements are inherently social and political expressions of heterogenous cultures and diverse ‘desirable' futures, and as such are deeply intertwined with contested pasts and relations of power and representation. Looking for traces of former ways of being in world, and increasingly turning to ‘indigenous knowledge’ as a reference for ways to move forwards, regenerative design models raise critical questions as to whose narratives of the past are being evoked, who has the right to speak for whom, and what is being remembered and what forgotten. Similarly, what concepts of the future are being imagined, by whom and for whom, and how might some forms of living be enabled while other possibilities are negated?
The lecture series is a joint event between the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material« and the Department of Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Organized by Prof. Dr. Lucy Norris.
Location
The lecture series is an on-site event. It starts on Thursday, May 2nd, 2024 at 4:15 pm. Please be on time! The lectures will be held in English.
The Global Fashioning Assembly (GFA) is a biennial online coalitional gathering beyond institutional, disciplinary and geographical boundaries that aims to decolonise and decentralise knowledge creation and sharing regarding body fashioning. To disrupts conventional colonial power relations often at play in global (academic) gatherings, the hosting of the Assembly is passed on from one community to the next, ensuring self-determination, self-governance and self-representation. Each hosting community decides on its own programme, content(s), format(s), language(s), aesthetics and participants according to its specific experiences and practices, struggles and pathways. Each hosting community welcomes local stakeholders, communities and audiences in a combination of local languages and English.
Underpinning the GFA is a communal, decentral and experimental process in terms of collective ideation, decision making and development. Preparations begin two years prior to the Assembly, with the hosting coalitions meeting bi-monthly to formulate the overall conceptual framework, thematic scopes, hosting communities, planning and budgeting and writing funding applications. Tasks are divided organically with smaller groups forming to take on different responsibilities including communication, graphic design, budgeting, planning and funding.
For this talk, three hosting communities will share their experiences with the GFA and collectively reflect on responsibility when exchanging fashion practices and knowledges across the colonial difference, in settings of unequal power relations (in the human and with the non-human world) due to the modern/colonial order. How to disrupt modern/colonial frameworks where institutional/written/empirical knowledge is considered superior to lived/oral/positioned knowledges? How to challenge the logics of contemporary fashion as the point of departure, with a focus on narratives of competition and capitalism NOT in a reciprocal dialogue with human and nonhuman world, with only the human part of the fashion ecosystem being acknowledged and the nonhuman world only seen in extractive terms? How to shift the focus on western concepts like fashion and sustainability, in English, to local concepts in local languages? while silencing the cultural, social and racial inequalities that continue to characterise the contemporary fashion industry.
Angela Jansen is a decolonial researcher, educator, consultant, curator, and director of the Research Collective for Decoloniality & Fashion (RCDF). As a unique platform beyond institutional, disciplinary, and geographical boundaries, the RCDF experiments with decolonial ways of knowledge-creation and sharing concerning fashion—through conversation, through the communal and coalition, and through a broad diversity of voices across age, race, gender, education, discipline and geography.
Richa Sood is a designer, consultant, conceptualiser, and educator at the Indian Institute of Art and Design in New Delhi. She is a specialist in graphic design for textiles and engineered (digital) prints for garments. With over 20 years of work experience in the Indian fashion industry, she has worked with the most known Indian couture brands. She has led and undertaken independent design projects with leading designers, and corporate and export houses. She has trained in Indian classical dance (Odissi), Hindustani classical music and remains a painter at heart.
Jennifer Whitty is Adjunct Research Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture and Design Innovation at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington. Her work, as an educator, designer and researcher aims to usher in a new era of deep systemic change for global fashion, that is expansive and diverse, rooted in social and environmental justice. She specialises in reimagining mindsets, models, and systems for fashion through the integration of theory, and practice. Through the lens of systems thinking and design, decolonization, participatory design, craft of use, ecology, transition design, zero/minimal waste thinking, social innovation, and earth logic.
There is probably no other region in Europe where growth and shrinkage are as close to each other as in Berlin and Brandenburg – and especially in Lausitz. The Lausitz region, despite »Reconstruction East« and an unprecedented transformation from one of the largest opencast coal mining regions in the world to a gigantic local recreation area, now known as the Lausitz Lakeland, has shrunk considerably at the same time.
For us, Lusatia is a region of the future with enormous potential for the energy transition, for industrial production, but also as an attractive residential location and leisure region. But how can we shift the discourse from one of deficits to one of opportunities? What does a realistic, future-oriented vision for Lausitz look like, one that avoids romanticizing rural life or fostering unsustainable growth? The region’s future hinges on developing a resilient model that balances growth with environmental and social considerations, aiming for a harmonious influx of people that aligns with the region’s capacity and preserves its character. The talk will draw on Cordelia’s practical projects to show which steps can be taken on the way to a new narrative of Lusatia.
Dr. Cordelia Polinna, born in 1975 in Berlin, is an urban planner and researcher. She studied Urban and Regional Planning, as well as Urban Design, in Berlin and Edinburgh. After completing her doctorate at the Technical University of Berlin, she served as a visiting professor there from 2011-2013, teaching Planning and Architectural Sociology.
Dr. Polinna has extensive experience in research and teaching, both nationally and internationally. She was a DFG Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Transatlantic Graduate College »Berlin – New York History and Culture of Metropolises in the 20th Century« and spent time as a Visiting Scholar at New York University.
During her career, she founded Polinna Hauck Landscape + Urbanism, and was the managing partner at Urban Catalyst GmbH (2017-2022). There she headed numerous projects which dealt with strategic planning, spatial transformation, participatory planning processes and sustainable mobility e.g. in Berlin, Munich, Bern/Switzerland and at a national level. In 2022 she founded the planning consultancy forward Planung und Forschung based in Berlin.
In 2022 Cordelia also founded the Institut für Resilienz im Ländlichen Raum with architect Simon Breth, based in Annahütte in the district of Oberspreewald-Lausitz. The Institute for Resilience in Rural Areas uses specific projects to test and research the extent to which a multi-perspective, integrated approach to the topic of resilience can initiate a transformation that allows us to deal well with crises and the associated disruptions and to contribute to sustainable and resilient spatial development. Cordelia explores the relationship between city and countryside, commuting between Berlin and Lusatia.
She is a member of the German Academy for Urban and Regional Planning (DASL) and a registered urban planner in the Berlin Chamber of Architects.
Climate breakdown fundamentally alters architecture as we know it: as discipline, practice, field, and education. The systemic changes required to avoid complete ecological collapse should be accompanied by reimagined forms of architecture. The talk will take you through the research project »Architecture is Climate« which reimagines the future of architecture through exploring its entanglements with climate breakdown. It takes a critical look at architecture's obsession with buildings and instead suggests ways of doing architecture beyond current norms. Building on a variety of spatial and non-spatial examples that provide powerful counterweights to dominant narratives, the focus will be on prompts for how other social and spatial practices might be imagined and enacted.
Tatjana Schneider is a scholar, writer, educator, and director of the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture and the City (GTAS) at the Technical University of Braunschweig. In the face of climate breakdown, concomitant and intertwined epochal transformations, and increasing socio-spatial inequalities, her research and teaching are concerned with case studies that demand and promote principles of the common good and resist violent - exploitative, speculative and exclusionary - productions of space. She is currently working on a series of research projects that focus on the systemic changes that need to accompany reimagined forms and practices of architecture, most notably Architecture is Climate. In 2021, she ran for mayor of the city where she lives: Braunschweig.
Design anthropology, as a relatively recently coined discipline, is mostly understood as a progressive practice successfully dissolving disciplinary boundaries and potentially fostering regenerative design outcomes through community-based co-design initiatives. Using case studies of what might be described as early experiments in regenerative design anthropology, these ‘indigenous entanglements’ will be placed in critical historical context. The talk will highlight how the origins of these interventions lies, not in the grassroots initiatives of radical design and ecological activities, but in early Cold War US policies that saw anthropology and design harnessed for purposes of ‘development’ in geo-politically sensitive regions.
Professor Alison J Clarke is a design historian and social anthropologist. Chair of Design History & Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and Director of the Papanek Foundation, her most recent research considers the role of design and anthropology in Cold War development contexts and the subsequent legacies of this disciplinary relation. She is author of Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World (MIT Press, 2021) and is presently working on a further book project with MIT Press titled Design Anthropology: Decolonizing and Recolonizing the Material World.
Basketry hand skills involve familiarity with materials, hand-to-eye coordination, and dexterity. All of these activities nurture a developing human attention out into the world, and also inwards, integrating mind, body and environment. Basketry-like textiles are some of the earliest biodegradable textile forms made by humans. In their creation, basket-making thus both reflects developments in human cognition and is also implicated in that development.
Used as a means of occupational therapy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, basketry skills were considered to be healing for people with acquired brain injury, shell shock, and stroke. And yet practical basketry techniques and can also contribute to mathematical understanding, the gestural skills involved expanding geometric and spatial comprehension. At the same time, as artefacts made from plants, baskets, and related textiles ground this knowledge firmly in the environment. There is a sense, then, that practically engaging with basketry skills can provide a form of renewal and growth, for the injured, for human learning, and for the environment. It is therefore of concern that such skills are often now deemed obsolete with the growth of more mechanical systems for making.
In this guest lecture, Dr Stephanie Bunn draws on her experience of working with basketry practitioners, mathematicians and with the UK National Willow Collection to explore these questions.
Stephanie Bunn is Leverhulme Emeritus Research Fellow, Dept. of Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews.