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GOLD Textiles from collagen. Image: Denny Sachtleben WINT Design Lab
30.11.2023–31.8.2024
Felix Rasehorn Awarded for the Project »GOLD Bio-Textiles for Sustainability«
Ecodesign Award 2023
We warmly congratulate Cluster Member Felix Rasehorn: His design and research lab WINT won the eco-design award 2023 in the category concept for the collaborative research project »GOLD Bio-textiles for sustainability«. As part of a research initiative, the GOLD project investigated goldbeater’s skin, a type of tissue found in cow gut. This elastic membrane was characterized biochemically to develop a recyclable, bio-based and vegan high-performance textile.
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Ernest Cormier, Thermometer. ARCH252051 Ernest Cormier fonds, CCA. Copyright: Fonds Ernest Cormier, CCA
29.1.2024–31.12.2024
Carbon Present
Virtual Exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal
What does climate accountability look like for architecture? In an online exhibition curated by Arièle Dionne-Krosnick at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the participants in the »2022 Toolkit for Today: Carbon Present« seminar and the »2022 Doctoral Research Residency Program«, such as Cluster member Iva Rešetar, were invited to collaboratively re-read objects from the CCA collections in ways that highlight how carbon shapes our present built environment. »Researchers generated dynamic terms to frame how we have historically engaged with and continue to manage carbon: to regulate design expertise, to shape social and lived experience, to be comfortable, and to relate to (and profit from) built and natural environments« (CCA).
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Exhibition view »Closer to Nature. Building with Mushroom, Tree, Clay«, Berlinische Galerie. Copyright: Photo: Harry Schnitger
16.2.2024–14.10.2024
Closer to Nature
Experimental Building by SciArt Collective MY-CO-X on Show at Berlinische Galerie
Architecture and nature inevitably compete for space. That poses a dilemma when resources are finite and the demand for space keeps growing. Besides, we know that the construction sector generates huge waste and emissions. All this has raised issues about the role of architecture: Does it need a shift in perspective? Could we build with nature instead of against it? The exhibition »Closer to Nature« at the Berlinische Galerie showcases three Berlin-based projects, that utilize the potential of mushrooms, living trees, and clay. This gives them an ecological quality, but also a completely new character: the buildings breathe, grow, and thus become alive themselves. One of the showcased projects is the experimental building MY-CO SPACE, which was developed, designed, and built by the interdisciplinary Berlin SciArt collective MY-CO-X, an initiative of the Department of Applied and Molecular Microbiology at TU Berlin under the direction of MoA member Vera Meyer with contributions by Dimitra Almpani-Lekka.
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Charlett Wenig, Bark Sphere, 2021. Copyright: Alexander Magerl
14.3.2024–31.7.2024
Materialzukünfte besuchen
Matters of Activity und CollActive Materials starten Kooperation mit Futurium Lab
»Matters of Activity« und das Experimentallabor für Wissenschaftskommunikation »CollActive Materials« starteten im März eine neue Veranstaltungsreihe im Futurium Lab. Unter dem Titel »Materialzukünfte besuchen« finden über vier Monate vier Workshops statt, die die Forschung des Clusters mit der Zivilgesellschaft zusammenbringen und in denen gemeinsam über Materialzukünfte spekuliert wird. Begleitet werden die Veranstaltungen von einer temporären Ausstellung im Futurium Lab, die ab 4. Mai besucht werden kann.
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Key Visual, MoA Design Research Studio, 2024. Copyright: Matters of Activity
16.4.2024
Shaping Water
MoA Design Research Studio at weißensee school of art and design Enters New Round
In the »Shaping Water« project, starting in the summer semester of 2024, Prof. Carola Zwick, design researcher Dominic Eger Domingos, and design students want to examine and challenge civilizational standards, usage patterns, and experiences to rethink the medium of water and how we experience it. Through this exploration, we aspire to develop new interaction concepts and product ideas, brought to life in prototypes and exhibits that resonate with users on a tangible level. The project is part of the Design Research Studio within the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity« (Filtering) and is constantly supported by eLAB (Laboratory for Interactive Technologies of KHB) throughout the project starting with a hands-on workshop delving into physical computing as expression of design.
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Bauhaus Earth Fellows 2024 Angie Dub and Heidi Jalkh
25.4.2024–28.11.2024
From Mono-Material to Multi-Performance
MoA Member Heidi Jalkh and Angie Dub New Bauhaus Earth Fellows
We are delighted that MoA Associated Member Heidi Jalkh has been awarded one of the 2024 Bauhaus Earth Fellowships together with Argentinian colleague Angie Dub. Congratulations! In their project »From Mono-Material to Multi-Performance« materials designer Heidi Jalkh and environmental architect Angie Dub will focus on advancing a bioceramic material made at ambient temperature from shellfish industry waste. Through this work, they will build on 10 years of experience in materials experimentation. The fellowship will enable critical milestones towards certification for application by prototyping and testing mono-material gradients in collaboration with RWTH Aachen. At the same time, Heidi and Angie will work with Bauhaus Earth to demonstrate potential applications of the material in 1:1 architectural fragments in Berlin and Buenos Aires.
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Poster Lecture Series 2024, Photo: Charlotte Linton. Copyright: Matters of Activity.
2.5.2024–11.7.2024
Cultures of Regeneration
On 11 July, David Jeevendrampillai Speaks about Extra-Terrestrial Anthropology: Design Thinking for a Post-Planetary Social Life
Rapidly increasing socio-ecological damage and the urgent need for care, repair, and recovery have 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 our interdependence on natural ecosystems, regenerative systems thinking is being applied to fundamental fields of human activity, from food production and agriculture to medicine, textiles, architecture, rural revival, and the urban built environment to other-worldly materialities. The lecture series organized by Lucy Norris, which started on May 2nd, will, among other things, explore how traces of former ways of being in the world and concepts such as ›indigenous knowledge‹ are referenced as ways to move forward and ask what futures are being imagined by whom and for whom, and how some forms of living are enabled while other possibilities are negated.
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Ausstellung »Visiting Material Futures«, Futurium 2024. Copyright: David von Becker
3.5.2024–25.8.2024
Visiting Material Futures
Pop-up Exhibition at Futurium
What material futures can we envision if we engage in collaborative speculation? The pop-up exhibition »Visiting Material Futures« explores this question through contributions from Cluster researchers and Futurium workshop participants. The collaboration between »Matters of Activity«, »Futurium«, and the experimental laboratory for Science Communication »CollActive Materials« employs the concept of co-speculation. This method invites knowledge from research, experience, and everyday life into a co-creative exchange about what material futures seem possible to us today. Don't miss your chance to visit the exhibition until the end of August!
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Book Cover Perraudin, L. 2024. Elementare Ekstasen. Sondierungen der Technosphäre. Series: Future Ecologies, Lüneburg: meson Press.
31.5.2024–31.1.2025
Elementare Ekstasen. Sondierungen der Technosphäre
Monografie von Clustermitglied Léa Perraudin Open Access veröffentlicht
Elementare Ekstasen überschwemmen, erodieren und evaporieren die wohlsortierten Grenzziehungen zwischen Technik, Umwelt und Mensch. Als Neuverortung im Spannungsfeld medienökologischer, neomaterialistischer und technikfeministischer Theoriebildung sondiert Léa Perraudin all jene Widerständigkeiten und Un/Verfügbarkeiten, die von techno-kapitalistisch protegierten Operationen nicht zu tilgen sind.
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26.6.2024
Wege zur Professur
Vera Meyer zu Gast in neuester Folge des BUA-Podcast »Spot ON«
Im neuen Podcast »Spot ON - Wege zur Professur«, sprechen Mitglieder der Postdoc-Academy der Berlin University Alliance mit Professor*innen aus den vier Berliner Universitäten über ihren Weg zur Professur. Hier geht es nicht um Karriere-Blaupausen, sondern wir wollen wissen: Was waren die entscheidenden Abzweigungen auf dem Karriereweg? Was war im Rückblick besonders wichtig? Was hätten sie gern früher gewusst und was würden sie Postdocs heute empfehlen, die eine akademische Karriere anstreben? Wer oder was hat sie besonders beeinflusst? Und ist es jetzt so, wie sie es sich vorgestellt hatten? In der neuesten Folge gibt Clustermitglied Vera Meyer, Professorin für Mikrobiologie an der TU Berlin, Antworten auf diese Fragen und Einblicke in ihre Forschung.
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Publication »Raue Reihe«, edited by Horst Bredekamp with a first issue by Regine Hengge on »The Essential Role of Microbes in Planetary Metabolism«. Copyright: Matters of Activity
1.7.2024–31.12.2025
New Cluster Publication Series »Raue Reihe«
Edited by Horst Bredekamp with a First Issue by Regine Hengge on »The Essential Role of Microbes in Planetary Metabolism«
The academic series »Raue Reihe / Raw Studies« is a new publication organ of the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity« edited by Horst Bredekamp. Modeled on »grey literature« formats, such as the preprints of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin or the legendary Merve volumes, its issues will appear at irregular intervals and aim to support the publishing of Cluster literature in terms of processes, and rapidity, spontaneity, and process character. Its title, »Raue Reihe«, emphasizes the resistance of matter that continues to be the decisive determination of existence in all its varieties in our digital age.
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Tracing paraffin accumulations. Fieldwork on the coastline of the Curonian Spit in the Neringa Nature Reserve, Léa Perraudin and Iva Rešetar. 2024. Copyright: Iva Rešetar
1.7.2024
Latent Accumulations. Coastal Phase Change, Paraffin Pollution and Maintenance
Fieldwork of Léa Perraudin and Iva Rešetar on the Coastline of the Curonian Spit in the Neringa Nature Reserve
In their ongoing fieldwork in Nida, Lithuania, Iva Rešetar and Léa Perraudin are concerned with the scales and phases of paraffin (re-)distribution in this seemingly pristine natural environment. Latent Accumulations focuses on the ecopolitics of paraffin pollution, engaging the material as unsettled in its movement and energy exchange. They argue that it is precisely the process of phase transition that gives rise to this uncertain ontological status – between solid and liquid, slow and sudden, and between events of pollution, their materialization and maintenance.
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Concorde Lobster Dinner, 1978. Copyright: Air France.
2.7.2024
Kulturtechniken der Mobilität – Material Cultures of Mobility
Exploratory Workshop
Kulturtechniken der Mobilität – Material Cultures of Mobility aims to foster research into the historical interplay between mobility, cultural techniques, and material culture. By examining how cultural techniques, technologies, and objects have historically facilitated movement and shaped travel, we seek to develop new research questions that can lead to future grant applications. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, participants of this workshop on July 2nd, 2024, will explore themes such as the evolution of travel technologies, the socio-economic impacts and material manifestations of mobility.
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Fermentation preparation with Tanyaporn Tantasathien. Thailand 2024. Copyright: Emma Sicher
2.7.2024
Generating Biomaterials By Acetic Fermentation
Emma Sicher Exchanged Knowledge with Researchers and Practitioners in Thailand
Between May and June, doctoral researcher Emma Sicher spent three weeks in Thailand as part of her PhD in Design Studies. Invited by Professor Aracha Krasae-in, she presented the work of the Cluster and her current research at the Faculty of Architecture of Kasetsart University in Bangkok. There, she also exchanged ideas with Professor Prakit Sukyai, an expert in Biotechnology and Biopolymers. Additionally, she presented at the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts of Thammasat University, invited by Professor Wuthigrai Siriphon.
The heart of the experience consisted of visits to two sites associated with acetic fermentation techniques that can generate biomaterials. These techniques range from ancient practices to more recent methods, employed in various ways from fertilizers to health-promoting substances. The visits took place in small artisanal production realities in Nakhon Ratchasima province, including Stefano and Somporn Abbruzzese, and Micro Friends, an initiative run by Tanyaporn Tantasathien and Waratchanat Thongthiangtham at the Baan Ama farm stay. more
The heart of the experience consisted of visits to two sites associated with acetic fermentation techniques that can generate biomaterials. These techniques range from ancient practices to more recent methods, employed in various ways from fertilizers to health-promoting substances. The visits took place in small artisanal production realities in Nakhon Ratchasima province, including Stefano and Somporn Abbruzzese, and Micro Friends, an initiative run by Tanyaporn Tantasathien and Waratchanat Thongthiangtham at the Baan Ama farm stay. more
Edward Burtinsky, Iberia Quarries #2, Marmorose EFA Co., Bencatel, Portugal, 2006
8.7.2024–19.7.2024
Before the Object. Material Histories, Infrastructures and Ecologies
Call for Participation
What happens before matter becomes art – what happens before the object? This workshop organized by Cluster member Kaja Ninnis together with Ursula Ströbele at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, November 21rst to 23rd, 2024 is dedicated to exploring not artworks, but the »stuff« artworks are made of and the ecological implications of their procurement, processing and transport, aiming at uncovering what Laura Turner Igoe has called »the ecological unconcious of art matter«. Interested MoA members are warmly invited to participate.
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TRAZOS Edición Biomateriales, 2024, Gisela Pozzetti, Heidi Jalkh, Sistemas Materiales. Photo: Maia Croizet
12.7.2024–26.8.2024
Matter of South. Biomaterial Cultures from Latin America
Exhibition Opening at Kunstgewerbemuseum on 12 July
Under the new discursive platform »More Than Human: Design after the Anthropocene« at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin, created by Claudia Banz, Heidi Jalkh has been invited to curate a project in collaboration with co-curators Gisela Pozzetti and Valentina Aliaga. The »Matter of South - Biomaterial Cultures from Latin America« project explores how biomaterial initiatives in this region harness local culture and biodiversity to create new material cultures. This endeavor also aims to reframe our relationship with the immediate environment while questioning and providing alternatives to the established extractivist model. The exhibition will open on July 12th, 7 pm, and runs through August 26th. A two-day international symposium on this topic is scheduled for the project, tentatively set for July 17th-18th.
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Maxime Le Calvé, Sketching at Kunstgewerbemuseum, More-Than-Human Sketching 2.0 Workshop, 2024. Copyright: Maxime Le Calvé
12.7.2024–26.8.2024
Wunderkammer Set #2 at Kunstgewerbemuseum
Results of »More-Than-Human Sketching« Workshop Exhibited
The results of the »More-than-Human Sketching« project, a participative design anthropology research process by Elaine Bonavia, Paulina Greta Stefanovic, Maxime Le Calvé, and Nayeli Vega, will be on display from July 12th as part of the second set of the »Intervention Wunderkammer« at Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin. Based on the findings of this work, guided tours of the Kunstgewerbemuseum are now being offered for the first time using augmented reality headsets. Visitors are invited to sketch in 3D (in augmented reality and on paper), following a score inspired by design research, graphic anthropology, and experimental anatomical pedagogy.
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16.7.2024
Horst Bredekamp Member of Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts
At the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts public annual meeting last Wednesday, July 10th, Senior Co-Director of Matters of Activity Horst Bredekamp was accepted as a full member of the Fine Arts Department. We warmly congratulate Professor Bredekamp on this honor. Founded in 1948 by the Free State of Bavaria as the »highest entity for fostering art«, the Academy's mission is to contribute to the intellectual debate within the arts and between society, and to advocate the dignity of art.
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Copyright: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstgewerbemuseum / Gestaltung: cyan Berlin
17.7.2024
The Making of »Matter of South. Biomaterial Cultures form Latin America«
Roundtable and Q&A
On July 12th 2024, the exhibition and research project »Matter of South. Biomaterial Cultures from Latin America« opened its doors. Its curators Heidi Jalkh, Gisela Pozzetti and Valentina Aliaga Vargas are investigating to which extent the development of biomaterials can create new relationships between people and their environment in the future. What alternatives can there be to our extractivist practices? In this round table discussion with the three curators and further players, on July 17th, you can find out more about the background and vision of the »Matter of South« initiative.
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Bi-Leaf - Morphology of a Movement, Antonia Dönitz, Master Thesis Textile and Material Design, 2024. Image Copyright: Antonia Dönitz / weißensee school of art and design
20.7.2024–21.7.2024
Open House 2024 at Weißensee School of Art and Design
Student Projects On View in Collaboration with »Matters of Activity«
On July 20th and 21st, 2024, 12.00–8.00 pm, weißensee school of art and design berlin will open its studios for the traditional Open House. Also this year, there will be the opportunity to learn more about the design research projects and students’ works developed during the previous year, some of them in cooperation with or in classes led by researchers of the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity«.
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Workshop »More than Human Sketching 1«, Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin, May 2024. Copyright: Maxime Le Calvé.
20.7.2024–21.8.2024
3D Drawing in the Kunstgewerbemuseum
Immersive Performative Guided Tour Developed by MoA Members
You can now experience the collections of the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin through an immersive performative tour developed by MoA members Elaine Bonavia, Maxime Le Calvé, Kotryna Šlapšinskaitė, Paulina Greta Stefanovic, and Nayeli Vega Vargas. Small groups of visitors are equipped with augmented reality headsets and invited to sketch in 3D (in augmented reality and on paper), following a score inspired by design research, graphic anthropology, and experimental anatomical pedagogy. Register now for your 3D drawing tour in July or August!
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ADLERhalle, Berlin-Kreuzberg, Copyright: Babette Werner
2.8.2024–7.8.2024
Super Contemporary Arts Fest
Dragoner.02 Curated by Babette Werner
On August 2nd, the »Dragoner.02 – Super Contemporary Arts Fest« on the grounds of the Dragonerareal in Berlin-Kreuzberg will open its doors. The festival was initiated in 2023 by the artists and curators Yasmin Alt, Luis Bortt, Jan Herdlicka and MoA member Babette Werner to provide an inclusive platform to connect in creative speculation and to activate the public space with many for many. One of the 40 positions shown from diverse disciplines such as painting, photography, sculpture, and performance will be by Cluster member Clemens Winkler.
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Vorketzin, 2019. Photo: Jonas Stuck
22.9.2024
Exploring Infrastructures of Waste
Save the Date for a Bike Tour Through Berlin’s Hinterland
Alwin Cubasch, Christian Kassung and Heike Weber from the Filtering project cordially invite you to a bicycle tour of contaminated sites in the Berlin area, organized and conducted by Jonas Stuck from the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and based on his research results. This bike tour on 22 September 204 explores three significant landfills used to dispose of Western waste in East Germany during the period of Germany’s division. We dive into the beginnings of the trade of waste between West and East Germany and its geo- and socio-political, environmental, and economic implications. We discuss different types of
waste disposed of and their impact on the surrounding ecologies. Examples of historical records and waste management strategies will be shown alongside the contemporary efforts of managing these legacies. more
waste disposed of and their impact on the surrounding ecologies. Examples of historical records and waste management strategies will be shown alongside the contemporary efforts of managing these legacies. more