Per-Forming Atmospheric Commons
EU Policy Lab: Clemens Winkler Co-Led Workshop in Brussels
Workshop »Per-Forming Atmospheric Commons«, led by Clemens Winkler and Myriel Milicevic, at PolyFutures – Reimagining Policymaking for Europe, Brussels, April 2026. Photo: Clemens Winkler
At PolyFutures – Reimagining Policymaking for Europe, a two-day event organized by the European Commission’s EU Policy Lab in Brussels, Clemens Winkler co-led the workshop »Per-Forming Atmospheric Commons« with Myriel Milicevic (Potsdam University of Applied Sciences). The event brought together researchers, designers, foresight experts, behavioral insights practitioners, and policymakers to explore how creative, participatory, and forward-looking methods can transform European policymaking. The event was organized by the EU Policy Lab, which is part of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.
The workshop took place in the event's »Sensing« track and translated Clemens' research on air, microclimates, and atmospheric infrastructures into a space of political possibility. Under the guiding question »Air as Common Ground?«, participants set out to explore air not only as an environmental condition but as a shared, political, and more-than-human medium via Clemens' techniques of atmospheric field research, including soil and water sampling, air catching, scent analysis, protocolling, and situated self-reflection.
The range of topics spanned from nuclear safety, existential risk research, and social security, all the way to European research funding, strategic foresight, policy design, and public administration. It was precisely this diverse mix that made the air as a commons tangibly perceptible: as a shared medium of bodies, particles, microbes, moisture, emissions, security policies, and visions of the future. Thus, the workshop became an experiment in which atmospheric design and policy-making intertwined: the focus was not merely on scenarios or data, but on embodied perception, situated observation, and the collective negotiation of shared atmospheres.
