Cultures of Regeneration
On 11 July, David Jeevendrampillai spoke about Extra-Terrestrial Anthropology: Design Thinking for a Post-Planetary Social Life
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 was 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 was an on-site event. It started on Thursday, May 2nd, 2024 at 4:15 pm.
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.
In this talk, the idea of design(s) for degrowth will be explored alongside discussions of the sorts of materials and making cultures that might be part of such a phenomenon. Empirically-speaking, the focus will be mostly on quite humble and long-existing building practices with what are often commonly termed “natural materials”, and on earth - as one of those materials - in particular. The regenerative potentials of this material and its ways of building will be considered, and the relation between regeneration and degrowth and design discussed in this light. The talk will be asking if it might be fruitful to think about degrowth through this material lens? To do so, it will draw on some ethnographic work with eco-builders and earth practitioners, but will also take this opportunity to wonder about design, production and consumption more broadly, and to think with the audience about how design practices might be reshaped for our times, drawing from some of the earthy practices discussed for inspiration, towards the (re)shaping of just and sustainable forms of human life on our shared and more-than-human planet.
Rachel Harkness is Lecturer in Design Ecologies and Programme Director of the Design for Change postgraduate MA at the University of Edinburgh, where she teaches social and ecological design. Her creative anthropological research explores making, building, and dwelling as peopled and material imaginative processes, considering how people, together, make manifest their eco-designs for living.
Bone has a unique capability to completely heal without any remaining scar. This capability is maintained up to high ages and even in compromised settings such as diabetes or immune-aged settings. In order to steer regeneration in such compromised patient settings, it is essential to understand how systemic challenges alter the endogenous regenerative cascades.
Our findings indicate that, in old age, there is a pro-inflammatory milieu in the bone which further reduces the chronologically caused decrease of the regenerative ability. This effect is even more pronounced in more experienced immune system. We found a combination of weakened bone structure and increased inflammatory reactivity that substantially affected bone’s osteogenic capacity. The findings explain why not only bone structure but – specifically in regenerative situations – the immune systems inflammatory capacity and experience is a key aspect to be addressed if regeneration is to be reached. So far, the interaction of an experienced immune system with the cascades of endogenous regeneration have been widely neglected in clinical practice. Including a better understanding on the interaction of the immune and skeletal system and eventually re-balancing a mismatch of the two opens new avenues in treatment of patients with compromised healing situations.
Georg is the founding director of the Julius Wolff Institute at the Berlin Institute of Health of the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, a joint faculty of Humboldt University and Free University of Berlin. The Julius Wolff Institute brings together researchers from engineering, biomathematics, biology, biochemistry, immunology, and clinical scientists to develop new therapeutic strategies that enables regeneration in injured, compromised, or degenerated bones, muscles or joints.
Conceptually, Georg’s research aims at understanding the endogenous cascades that enable scar-free regeneration of bones and tries to unravel this power also for unmet medical needs that are hindered in regeneration. At the start of healing, cells self-organize, migrate, and contract in a highly inflamed environment with lack of nutrient supply but exaggerated mechanical conditions. It is fascinating that under these challenging conditions healing of bone almost always takes place, independent of gender, age or many compromised settings patients suffer. But in some, this healing is lagging or completely hindered.
Aim of Georg’s work is to understand how immune-therapeutic or mechano-therapeutic strategies could enable healing even in such impaired regenerative settings. All our approaches are motivated by unmet medical needs and a thorough analyses of these. Our basic science let to new concepts in joint replacements, fracture fixation devices, companion diagnostics or cell therapies for muscle and bone regeneration. Our in vivo load data is basis for all approvals of hip, knee, and should implants worldwide.
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.
Natural dyeing was the primary method used to color textiles globally prior to the widespread adoption of chemical dyes introduced from the 1850s. In Japan, where a vibrant, diverse and productive textile economy functioned into the 1980s, chemical dyes have also been embraced. But the importance of traditional practice to the ‘nation’ has meant many local industries continue to use natural materials in their dyeing practices, despite reduced output as textile production for the kimono cloth industry continues to decline. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the islands of Amami Oshima and Okinawa in southern Japan, this talk will consider how local dyeing practices are experiencing a resurgence guided by a new generation of migrant craftspeople who meld traditional and contemporary Japanese aesthetics and values. Yet rather than being confined to the products they make; I discuss how their work has a wider impact by contributing to the regeneration of the rural locations they have made their home.
Charlotte Linton is an anthropologist and designer whose work is situated at the intersection of visual, material and economic anthropology, textiles and ethnoecology. She is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at All Souls College, University of Oxford. Charlotte has carried out ethnographic work with Harris Tweed weavers in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland (2016) and natural dye craftspeople on the island of Amami Oshima, southern Japan (2021 & 2023). Her current research explores the intersection of textiles and agriculture in the UK, USA and India.
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.
What happens to our conceptions of being human, our bodies, our relationships to others, to the environment from plant to house when we leave the familiarity of the Earth? Through investigations into the anthropology of outer space, this talk will present learnings from building a home on Mars, growing plants on the International Space Station, hugging in microgravity, and going to the bathroom on the Moon. In so doing we will consider the role of Utopia in our conceptions of home, our relation to plants in the age of an impending ecological apocalypse, the role of emotion in conceptions of future living, and eschatology in design practice and narratives of sustainability. Taking outer space design thinking as a frontier space of imaginative and creative design, the talk will ask what we can learn from such design practices. What do they tell us about the forms of humanity we imagine the future will bring and what might be possible when we become post-planetary?
David Jeevendrampillai (Jeeva) is a Senior Research Fellow in Anthropology on the European Research Council Funded ETHNO-ISS project at UCL. He researches emerging notions of planetary citizenship with particular reference to those who advocate for the power of seeing the Earth from space. In doing so he considers the emergent notions of territory, place, and universal human futures as people grapple with cosmic and planetary-scale social belonging. He is the founder and director of UCL’s Centre of Outer Space Studies, a member of the UCL Space Domain Committee and the IAF’s Space Habitats Committee. He has consulted with organizations working on space habitats at NASA, ESA, and on Earth-based analogs for outer space living. He has previously published on community building at the local scale, now working at the planetary scale his work encompasses anthropology of technology, place, notions of the future, design, utopianism, and fears of the end of the Earth.