Materializing Futurity - Matters of Activity

Sand ruler captured at the labs of Deltares in Delft, Michaela Büsse, 2021

This research strand takes up the ambiguous role of materials in future-making practices. Different materials, such as sand and water, as well as whole ecosystems are the objects and interfaces of a range of technologies and infrastructural interventions enabling and foreclosing potential futures. And yet, these materials and ecosystems often stubbornly evade the efforts of technical experts to tame their unruly behaviour. Instead, their inherent activity allows us to delineate new alliances, forms of resistance and participation. Highlighting frictions between matter’s activity and attempts to control it alerts us to the material politics of envisioning and enacting common but contested futures.

In two sub-projects, Granular Configurations (2021- 2023) and Blasted Landscapes (2023-2025), we explore artistic-scientific methods to trace, map, and challenge different pratices and technologies of engaging with, intervening in, and recofiguring of environments and materials in transformation.

Subevents

Edited Volume »Granular Configurations«

The edited volume »Granular Configurations: Sand, Materiality and Planetary Urbanization« will bring together contributions from geography, geology, social sciences, art, and humanities that investigate sand as a medium, material, and object of study. Sand’s existence is manifold. As a sediment, it communicates histories and activities; it clings to skins and winds, transports conditions and milieus. more

Assembling the Coast

Assembling the Coast is a sensorial-ethnographic investigation of a coastal replenishment project on the Baltic Sea, close to Ahrenshoop. Erosion and rising sea level lead to coastal retreat and frequent replenishments are used to counteract this process. The film work captures the interplay of man, machine, and matter as they perform the laborious process of transforming the environment. more

Workshop »Poetics and Politics of Sand«

The interdisciplinary workshop »Poetics and Politics of Sand« took place in 2023. The huge consumption of sand and its fundamental role in society have only recently gained attention. Numerous journalistic and scientific accounts warn of the »looming tragedy of the sand commons«; environmental concerns related to dredging and mining. more

Round Table »Poetics and Politics of Sand«

The Round Table »Politics and Poetics of Sand« held in February 2023 was part of the format series accompanying the exhibition »Design Lab #13: Material Legacies« at Kunstgewerbemuseum. It investigated the huge consumption of sand and its fundamental role in society that have only recently gained attention. more

Deep Material Futures

The conference »Deep Material Futures« discussed and rethought the potentialities, strategies, predictions and imaginaries of desirable futures in terms of interspecies and transgenerational justice. The temporalities of active matter we speak of are always about incommensurable spaces of memory and oblivion, of extinction and survival. What new and other ways of politics, design, and »healing« through materialized action might there then be at all levels of space, time, and scale? more

Design Lab #13: Material Legacies

The exhibition »Material Legacies« explored contingencies and ruptures between traditional crafts and the most recent developments at the crossroads of material research, design, engineering, and architecture. It brought together artifacts from the museum’s collection with work-in-progress installations by designers and researchers from MoA in order to initiate a dialogue about the historical, contemporary, and future conditions under which materiality unfolds.
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Premiere »White Elephant«

In 2013, Malaysian port city Malacca was declared a node in China’s Maritime Silk Road, a sea-based infrastructure project meant to connect China with Southeast Asia, Europe and Africa. Since then, numerous land reclamation and urbanization projects set out to transform Malacca’s coastline in expectation of increasing marine traffic and tourism. However, these expectations would never materialize. more

Members

Michaela Büsse

Anthropology of the Built Environment

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Prof. Dr. Sandra Jasper

Geography & Gender Studies

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Prof. Dr. Claudia Mareis

Design & Design Research

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