Waste

News | Material Form Function | Waste | Toxics Leila Wallisser has been awarded the First Prize of the German Design Graduate (GDG) Committee 2023 in the category »Sustainability and Circularity« for her Master’s Thesis »Toxic Legacies« conducted at weißensee school of art and design berlin, supervised by »Matters of Activity« members Prof. Dr.-Ing. Karola Dierichs and Prof. Dr. Lucy Norris. »Toxic Legacies« is an innovative design project that delves into the world of recycling, shedding light on how the concept of recycling can tend to justify the production of waste in a consumer-based system. more

Event | Filtering | Material Form Function | Waste | Toxics On August 30th, 2023, Cluster Professor Robert Stock will give a talk about Australia's nuclear contamination from a critical disability studies' perspective. In his contribution at the Annual International Conference of the Royal Geographic Society, Robert will focus on Yami Lester, a blind aboriginal activist engaged in social change and political intervention in the settler society of Australia. The RGS-IBG Annual International Conference is taking place in London at the Society and Imperial College London, and online from Wednesday 30 August to Friday 1 September 2023, prior registration is needed. more

Event | Material Form Function | Weaving | Waste | Tree Bark Wastework is an international, interdisciplinary 3-day conference on the materiality, spatiality, and processing of waste in the early modern workshop. It proposes to examine acts of disposal, displacement, removal, and abeyance – in short, the getting rid of unwanted things – and the consequences these carry for the study of early modern material culture. Cluster researcher Charlett Wenig is on the panel »Paradoxes of Matter«, on March 17th at 2:00 pm. more

Event | Filtering | Waste | Toxics The three-day-workshop »Tracing tainted environments: Legacies of Oranienburg« from March 14th-16th, 2023, explores different approaches to the historical legacies of the industrial site of Oranienburg in the north of Berlin. In different settings we are questioning adequate tools by joining various disciplinary perspectives on dealing with data and environmental pollution: human-computer interaction, design, history, and cultural and political studies. The industrial site of Oranienburg with its multi-layered historical legacies will be taken as a field of research and experimentation, thus providing a concrete setting for the workshop questions. In experimental series, talks and excursions, the three-day workshop explores the different dimensions of information in the context of non-tangible traces and summarizes them in design concepts. more

Event | Filtering | Waste Filtering Technologies are at the center of many current processes of our transformational age as they can alleviate the impact of industrial societies in their planetary dimension. We understand the process of filtering as a scalable environing technique that differentiates and maintains symbolic and material environments alike. Filtering is a process that matters in a twofold way: It is a material process and a symbolic activity. Applying filters means negotiating between the wanted and the unwanted, between the polluted and the untouched environment, and between what is considered dangerous or safe. The workshop organized by Alwin Cubasch, Vanessa Engelmann, Ronja Quast, Heike Weber and Verena Winiwarter aims for a better understanding of the ecologic economy of wastes, sinks and waste legacies which resulted from the hope to unmake the adverse byproducts of filtering activities. What have been the challenges and pitfalls of the past – and what can we learn for the future design and technology of filters? more