Materializing Futurity

This research strand takes up the ambiguous role of materials in future-making practices. Different materials from sand, water, sludge or air to whole ecosystems are the objects and interfaces of a range of technologies and infrastructural interventions enabling and foreclosing potential futures. And yet, these materials often stubbornly evade the efforts of technical experts to tame their unruly behavior. 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 various ways in which materiality affords new forms of political practices around envisioning and enacting common but contested futures. Moreover, materiality can allow for political gatherings in which diverse participants formulate, work on, and argue about common problems. In such more-than-human collectivities, futures are generated as much as they are contested.

Methodologically, this work requires situated exemplars of such assemblages in which socio-material entanglements are analyzed in a multiscalar and multimodal manner. Next to the collaboration with Filtering on radio-active futures in Oranienburg, we focus on the renaturalization of polluted grounds in Brandenburg and Berlin that highlight the ambivalent role of certain substances, their material legacies and future applications.

Our research strand kicked off in late 2022 with the exhibition Design Lab#13: Material Legacies, followed by the interdisciplinary workshop Politics and Poetics of Sand in early 2023. We are preparing a second workshop for 2024 focusing on toxins and energy futures.