Vorketzin, 2019. Photo: Jonas Stuck
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
Edward Burtinsky, Iberia Quarries #2, Marmorose EFA Co., Bencatel, Portugal, 2006
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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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
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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Workshop »Critical Times. Part II: Ecologies of Relation«, April 11-13, 2024, workshop with Lara Almarcegui at ALBETON concrete plant, Rotterdam. Photo: Rahel Kesselring
Workshop 11 to 13 April 2024
The workshop »Critical Times. Part II: Ecologies of Relation« brought together Post-Doc’s, PhD’s and advanced MA students from the humanities, social science, as well as arts and design to engage in a discussion about critical times and materialities, postcolonial and posthuman critique, non-European perspectives, and notions of »deep time« of materialities. »Critical Times. Part II: Ecologies of Relation« unfolded a critical conversation, contesting linear conceptions of time, reductionist notions of materiality, and teleological solutionism, by focusing on ecologies and relations. Either term, ecology and relation, has received much attention over the last decade, especially in the arts, design, and humanities. Both emphasize the intersection of different domains of knowledge, media and practice to understand and navigate the challenges of an increasingly complex present. With the workshop, we aimed to critically address and resituate the multi-faceted dimensions of both through in-depth and creative formats.
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Syntopia 0 – Anthropos I Human. Copyright: Roland Halbe
Karola Dierichs' Project Contributes to Exhibition and Symposium »Being Plastic/Becoming Plastic« at the University of Virginia
In March 2024, Karola Dierichs exhibits the project »Syntopia 0—Anthropos I Human« as part of the exhibition and symposium »Being Plastic/ Becoming Plastic« at the University of Virginia, US, under the direction of Ehsan Baharlou. Initially conducted under the title »ICD Aggregate Pavilion 2018«, the project explores the construction of spatial enclosures made from designed granular materials. Yet one might now call this project »Syntopia 0—Anthropos I Human« in the present discourse on human-made plastic residue. This considers the research not only as an example of materials design and construction robotics but also as a monument of anthropogenic mass superseding living biomass around 2020, given it was made of injection-molding plastic waste from the local Stuttgart car industry.
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Intro, Excursion Filtering Oranienburg, 2023. Foto: Sybille Neumeyer.
Online Documentation of Interdisciplinary Cluster Workshop Available Now
In March 2023, an interdisciplinary team from design, computer science, art, and cultural studies examined various concepts of dealing with radioactive waste and the historical environmental impact of the industrial site of Oranienburg. While exploring the history of radioactive legacies in Oranienburg, we were confronted with different types of information: traces of the former industrial sites and bombings, symbols, maps, or signs of cleaning and securing as well as memorials as part of today's culture of remembrance. Oranienburg, with its multi-layered historical legacies, but also the land activations that have taken place, thus offered a concrete environment for the workshop questions as a field of research and experimentation. The group now published detailed documentation of the workshop.
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Exhibition view »Closer to Nature. Building with Mushroom, Tree, Clay«, Berlinische Galerie. Copyright: Photo: Harry Schnitger
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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Workshop participants discussing T.J. Demos recent book »Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today« with the author. »Critical Times« at »Matters of Activity«, 17 & 18 November 2023
Workshop with Contributions by T. J. Demos, Sandra Jasper, Kiran Pereira & David Weber-Krebs
Time has become an increasingly critical factor and concept in the wake of Anthropocene debates. With the workshop »Critical Times. Part I: Multiple Matter«, which took place at »Matters of Activity« on November 17 and 18, the organizers asked, what times and temporalities shape the pressing crises of the present but also what temporalities allow for a critical response to a homogenizing crisis of such a present. The focus of the workshop resided in the conjunctions between speculative practices and narratives, other-than-scientific modes of sense-making as well as enchanting, violent, or haunting counter-/temporalities unfolding through eco-artistic practices. Around twenty-five multidisciplinary workshop participants engaged in discussions together with our invited guests — T.J. Demos, Sandra Jasper, Kiran Pereira and David Weber-Krebs.
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Copyright: Jann Mausen
Public Lecture by T. J. Demos as Part of »Critical Times. Part 1: Multiple Matter«
How might we rescue the future from the grips of planetary negativity, capitalist longtermism, and generalized catastrophism? It will take nothing less than cultivating an emancipated chronopolitics emerging from the traditions of the oppressed in relation to an undetermined not-yet. T. J. Demos presentation addresses recent creative modelings of radical Indigenous and Afrofuturist worlds-to-come and their radical temporal reconfigurations, founded upon social justice and environmental flourishing.
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Leben machen. Die Zoëpolitik der synthetischen Biologie. Copyright: DeGruyter
Publikation von Clustermitglied Martin Müller Open Access veröffentlicht
Die synthetische Biologie versucht sich gegenwärtig am Re-Design ganzer Gattungen, arbeitet an der ›resurrectio‹ längst ausgestorbener Arten zur Stabilisierung kollabierender Ökosysteme und greift mittels der Genomeditierungstechnologie CRISPR gezielt in die menschliche Keimbahn ein.
Für eine Kritik dieser prometheischen Biologie verbindet Martin Müller Ansätze aus Medien- und Kulturwissenschaft mit Designtheorie, Wissenschaftsphilosophie und Wissensgeschichte. Seine ›Genealogie der Zoëpolitik‹ ist gleichsam eine neue Macht- und Lebenstheorie. Sie beschreibt einen ›Willen zum Lebenmachen‹, der um 1800 entstand. Dieser intensivierte sich und eskalierte im 20. Jahrhundert in der ›molekularen Revolution‹ und heute im Auftauchen der synthetischen Biologie, welche die planetarische Natur und das biologische Leben in Gänze als ein Interventionsfeld ingenieurtechnischer Kalküle begreift. more
Für eine Kritik dieser prometheischen Biologie verbindet Martin Müller Ansätze aus Medien- und Kulturwissenschaft mit Designtheorie, Wissenschaftsphilosophie und Wissensgeschichte. Seine ›Genealogie der Zoëpolitik‹ ist gleichsam eine neue Macht- und Lebenstheorie. Sie beschreibt einen ›Willen zum Lebenmachen‹, der um 1800 entstand. Dieser intensivierte sich und eskalierte im 20. Jahrhundert in der ›molekularen Revolution‹ und heute im Auftauchen der synthetischen Biologie, welche die planetarische Natur und das biologische Leben in Gänze als ein Interventionsfeld ingenieurtechnischer Kalküle begreift. more
Hambacher Forst, Germany, March 2024. Copyright: Rahel Kesselring
This research project will contribute to their research by developing an interdisciplinary and humanities-based perspective on wood, forests, and bark. It will draw on new materialism, STS, history of knowledge; decolonial thought and posthuman approaches to map tree-related knowledges, technologies, and futures by drawing on scientific works, material cultures, and cultural production.
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A refugee`s hut in the so called Jungle at Calais, France, October 2016. Copyright: Thomas Müller
Emergent Structure and Structure of Emergence
Armchair, flamed birch wood with ivory and mother-of-pearl inlays, designed as part of a bedroom ensemble by Mackay Hughes Bailly Scott, made by the Dresdener Werkstätte für Handwerkskunst in 1903, Bröhan-Museum, Berlin.
The PhD project »(Hi)Stories of Transformation: Tracing Materials in the British Arts and Crafts Movement« by Kaja Ninnis investigates the environmental implications of the sourcing and transformation of ›raw‹ materials in the context of the British Arts and Crafts Movement.
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Tour through the abandoned city of Manheim with artist Silke Schatz and her art project »Manheim calling.« The town has been evacuated and demolished to make way for lignite mining close to »Hambacher Forst« in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Schatz’ ongoing art project is part of the investigation of Rahel’s PhD project »One Big Green Thought.« Image: Rahel Kesselring, March 2024.
Repair, Regeneration and Rewilding as Artistic Practices in Damaged Environments
In her doctoral project, Rahel investigates artistic practices, which are set in damaged environments and have plants, trees, and forests as their object of investigation. By analyzing selected case studies from the field of contemporary art and recent art history, the project aims to discuss arboreal politics, their medial modes of representation, and the epistemologies brought together in them
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Infra-red images, Lieberoser Heide, August 2023. Copyright: Konstantin Mitrokhov
The artistic-scientific research project »Blasted Landscapes« deals with the complicated history and controversial use of former military training areas in Brandenburg. Based on the different interests in relation to these sites we want to investigate how different landscape concepts are created and what assumptions about nature and culture underlie them.
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Edward Burtinsky, Iberia Quarries #2, Marmorose EFA Co., Bencatel, Portugal, 2006
Call for Participation
What happens before matter becomes art – what happens before the object? This workshop at Hochschule der Bildenden 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.
more