On 1 – 2 July 2023, E-WERK Luckenwalde presented Burn Out, the first in a series of symposiums presented by E-WERK on human and planetary sustainability.
Taking as its starting point Lynn Margulis’ endosymbiotic theory in which she researched microorganisms (algae, bacteria, yeasts, and fungi) and their ability to cooperate as a principle for the emergence of new species. Symbiotic Earth discussed how it might be possible to adopt an ecosystemic approach to institutional practice from a materials, architectural, social and curatorial perspective.
The symposium invited transdisciplinary speakers to present their individual research on specific themes related to human sustainability including climate and capitalism, de-growth and environmental imperialism and raise questions including how can we begin to enact radical care on an immediate, local and global level to repair colonial exploitations? Who does the green transition exploit? What are the limits to degrowth? Performances will be splintered throughout the programme to create pockets of non-didactic reflection to champion art as an equally valuable form of knowledge transmission.
The earth sighs deeply with the weight of its own planetary and human exhaustion. Hypercapitalism, the hamster wheel, chronic stress, repetitive strain injury, the rat race and perma-crisis, Burn Out. The hope for systemic change, a slower pace, better working conditions, planetary calm, economic and ecological progress all appear to have faded, and once again humanity and the planet is burning out.
Burn Out is part of a series of symposiums for the sustainable institution, in partnership with LUMA Arles and Rupert Vilnius, centre for art, residencies and education.
Co-funded by the European Union, Teltow Fläming, Musikfonds e.V. by means of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and Lithuanian Culture Council. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
this panel is called symbiotic Earth the institutional organism and this panel takes as its starting point Lin marg’s endosymbiotic theory in which she researched microorganisms so that’s alga bacteria yeasts fungi and their ability to cooperate as a principle for the emergence of new species Lin margalus was an evolutionary biologist who is largely credited as a pioneering mind in the development of the concept of symbiosis and evolution she radically subverted the preeminent Darwinism to move away from the degenerative conceptual model defined by Claus quen brow yesterday is that of business as usual greed is good hyper capitalism everything that’s essentially burning us all out to adopt a sustainable approach or even better to go towards a regenerative ecosystemic approach to institutional practice from a material’s architectural social and curatorial perspective and so I’m delighted to invite to introduce you to our interdisciplinary panel of thinkers who I’m sure have the answers to this brighter future so first off we have Kim Kim craon is a conservator of modern materials and Contemporary Arts specializing in sustainable practices in the art sector her area of expertise and primary focus in the field of sustainability is mitigating the environmental burden of materials and methods in art production exhibitions and Fine Art shipping at Key culture KRON is the director of materials at the Helm of the materials keybook an online sustainability guide for practitioners and cultural heritage KRON is an environmental advisor to Gallery Climate Coalition and a founding member of the GCC Berlin and so Kim is going to go first and just give you a little structure of how this panel is going to operate so everyone will have a 10-minute presentation quite speedy and then we’re going to have a short Q&A at the end and then I will invite you to go to stamp Tish and we’ll have a kind of conversation hopefully over a drink so yeah first delighted to introduce you to Kim thank you so much is this is this on yeah okay it’s on now thank you so much Helen um I’m so delighted to be here today um I’m going to be speaking about networks of care and the circular economy um so networks of care is a concept that I stole no I’m borrowing I’m borrowing it from from from the um the healthcare uh sector and also um conservation of time based media and digital media and it’s rooted in sort of this concept that the care for a person or an object or digital media artwork needs to be distributed among um varied specializations um so it’s requires interdisciplinary action to provide care and maintaining the network is additionally a focus of care um we can go ahead and and and start start this off thank you yeah so extending this met before then to the climate crisis so we previously worked in silos in the art sector institutions museums galleries artists everyone functioned as independent entities um and then also in tackling the climate change we are still continuing to do so but we require a collaborative interdisciplinary approach for the paradigm shift and systemic change necessary to reach the goals that are set forth in the um in the art sector from the GCC for example which is a minimum of 50% reduction of carbon emissions by 2030 and promoting zero waste practices uh and a vital aspect of networks of care is transparency so the network only functions if information and resources are readily exchanged and also accessible to everyone so fostering and maintaining a network that operates transparently then becomes very crucial um in this concept of networks of care um can go ahead and switch to the next slide so great so um in the GCC Berlin um of which Helen is also a founding member um we established ourselves in 2021 as a branch of GCC International following a principle of collaboration uh with the view that although environmental problems are Global Solutions are often linked to local resources uh one of the main aims of GCC Berlin is building networks within arts and cultural sector um and engendering collaboration among interdisciplinary art professionals and organizations to better organize share resources and educate one another to bring about systemic change and mitigate the environmental burden of the art sector so after a brief Hiatus um to establish our forine status in Germany GCC Berlin has relaunched as an independent nonprofit uh and a as part of our initial campaign we’re trying to move the Berlin art sector towards zero waste by implementing the circular economy uh GCC Berlin has teamed up with barter art which is an online material sharing platform to feature Berlin as a hub City on their website but before we talk about barter art um I think we should dig into what circular economy actually means um so oh sorry next slide so we need to oh go back it’s fine um so it’s it’s best to start off with our current global economy which is not circular so it’s the linear economy um and in the linear economy we take materials from the Earth make products from them and eventually throw them away as waste so the process is linear as you can see here so using an example of a cardboard box to make those boxes trees were harvested farmed and harvested or they were manufactured from hopefully recycled paper and then um the trees are processed with chemicals into the finished product which is to say the cardboard box and then this requires Energy Water uh yields pollutants and then after it is shipped to a distributor bought by a consumer and used for its purpose um it’s often discarded as waste uh hopefully in a recycling bin but still um it’s a single-use product often and then the circular economy next slide please in the circular economy uh nothing is waste in a circular economy we stop waste from being produced in the first place um The Ellen MacArthur Foundation which is the leading voice in the circular economy defines the circular economy as based on the principles of Designing out waste and pollution keeping products and materials in use and regenerating n natural systems so the circular economy requires large scale systemic changes in our approaches to design and material recovery um and it’s often cited that in the circular economy waste is a design flaw um but waste is also a byproduct of rampant consumerism um switch the but when we talk about the circular economy the next slide um there’s actually two two cycles at play the biological and the technical and the biological cycle it entails manufacturing materials with products from natural renewable resources that will biodegrade back into biological nutrients at the end of their working useful lifespan um thereby replenishing the Earth to uh continue the cycle the technical cycle entails keeping products in use for as long as possible as well as manufacturing products that can be disassembled and their parts reincorporated into the production of new products um so taking the cardboard box example again in the biological cycle you could use a material such as mycelium which is the tubular filaments of fungi um it has a negative carbon carbon uh footprint um and it takes 90 days to completely biodegrade in soil or water and replenishes the soil it adds nutrients to the soil so that would be example of a a material to use as a replacement in the biological cycle in the technical cycle you would use a potentially repurpose metal or dare I say plastic um that’s robust um modular and can um you can exchange out parts that are damaged to keep the product uh in circulation for as long as possible so this is another illustration the next slide please um yes this is another illustration of the circular systems um you can go ahead and skip the next next slide as well so in the technosphere which you see over here uh the way to eliminate waste are through sharing maintaining prolonging reusing redistributing refurbishing remanufacturing and then recycling materials um so in this Tech technosphere cycle um all materials are kept in circulation through reuse repair remanufacture and recycling is the very absolute Last Resort I know that we think of recycling as something that’s you know positive but we want to actually recycles the very last thing that we should do with our materials um but as you can see also from the diagram sharing products and materials is the foremost important impactful action one can undertake uh so now we’re going to skip ahead please Helen thank you so much um to barter art so barter art is now active in Berlin it is a peer-to-peer resource sharing tool for the Arts uh you can post any material or item such as exhibition Furniture so lighting equipment um frames plants the greens um anything you can think of even for like art art production you know paint that hasn’t been used entirely anything can go up there there’s an option to sell trade give away or lend which I feel we need to really emphasize as an option um we have around 170 museums 440 Galleries and 20,000 registered professional artists in Berlin that is is a Monumental amount of materials and and items that are that could be in circulation um so what I’m hoping to do this summer through GCC Berlin is to uh encourage and maybe put a little pressure on some of the larger institutions and larger museums they have warehouses full of plants they have warehouses full of of of items that they’re not using for exhibition making um that could be redistributed it could all be redistributed to smaller galleries um with the amount of of materials that we have already existing in Berlin there’s not a need to purchase anything new we could actually Implement a circular economy um with within the art sector I’m I’m like I’m we just need everyone to use it this is this is the this is the key factor we need everyone to to sign on to barter art um if you work in an institution a gallery if you’re an artist yourself uh we need everyone’s cooperation uh completely across the sector so you know moving towards a circular economy and sharing these resources and halting the list consumerism um and the waste that comes along with it um for me it’s intrinsic to the concept of networks of care uh and something that I definitely think that is within our reach in Berlin uh if you want to SK to the last side and here’s a few more um oh this is all the example of barter art sorry I I forgot I not can me click one more this is just a little little scroll through of some oh wait it should be act it should be a recording maybe maybe not oh there we go yeah some of the items that are that are available just as example so there’s there’s plants there’s crates um there’s building materials uh there’s packaging materials I mean any anything really goes but uh we want to get to a point that anything that you could potentially need would you could find on barter art um so sorry sorry and here’s some some um additional material sharing um platforms and organizations in Berlin if anyone is interested material Mafia also has building materials textiles lighting equipment um art Seco has a crate Bank um and like a takeback system for crates and circular berin is kind of like a repository they have an ecosystem which is you snapshot here of not just it’s not just for the art sector it’s spans across all sectors um yeah so if anyone wants to conduct some further research here you are and uh please keep up with GCC Berlin we have a lot of things planned uh in the next few months and years so yeah that’s wraps it up for me fantastic thank you so much kid and next up we have Yan Bolan so Yan is a Curative design architecture and Contemporary Art he’s the artistic director of Atia Luma one of our partner organizations for the sustainable institution an experimental laboratory of design in Al France he was curator of the fourth Istanbul design Bal in Istanbul in 2018 and initiated manifesta nine in Belgium in 2012 lastly bowan created the Lithuanian Pavilion planet of people at the Venice Bal architectural Bal in 2021 so hand it over to you Yan thank you thank you Helen uh thank you for being here and thanking for inviting me I’m Yul like set leading at Luma at Luma is part of oops uh yeah first of all where is it it’s in the south of France it’s in provance uh it’s near uh big natural park the Kamar uh there also uh but it’s mainly uh part of luma AR which is uh a big uh cultural Institute it’s the the first Gary building that you will see today uh probably uh and it’s uh a big side a former uh strain uh train station Railway uh repair building and Atelier Luma at this moment I don’t know if the cursor is working is in the last building uh of um this side I will point it then with my finger here there is at Luma I will elaborate on that part uh a bit more uh in the conversation today because one month ago we have built our own lab with our own materials uh aier Luma is uh is interested it’s a biodesign lab uh and we are developing bio uh Regional design practices that’s how we call it uh we have developed many materials we work together with lot of designers and artists and so on but uh for us the methodology is the most important uh you see here a map of the region with color dots where uh human resources and material resources get uh connected uh and with that map and with that with these findings we start to uh make connections uh Implement them in the real world uh and try to share and transmit this knowledge with other parts in the world I will elaborate on that later in the conversation takes a bit a while before the slides jump so this was where we were uh two years ago my Ling was working there with my celium um we invite designers they come uh and they find things uh in this case Studio Claren big uh alga we bring them together with uh uh biologists and other uh disciplines uh and out of that um uh we develop for instance biopolymer uh and a project a product becomes a a lab becomes a a platform becomes a community uh and step byep step we build that further uh this is Sunflower ARA is known for uh the sunflowers of Vincent F uh but we are interested mainly in the stems in the uh the stems of the sunflower uh because um that gives uh an interesting material that have acoustic Mater uh properties and can be kind of foamy uh replacement of polysterene foam um it’s not that what we really do uh developing only these materials we are trying to develop the whole uh supply chain and the Machine that you see on the right is the most important thing because it’s a it’s another way of harvesting um sunflower so we are not interested just in uh many people are interested in the oil and the seeds of sunflowers we are uh interested in the leftovers of Agriculture and uh make out of that uh products objects that can last for years always like to show sheep Europe uh is on a mountain of wool uh since Co China is not taking our wool waste anymore uh we don’t have uh uh um our own wool uh the our wool is coming from New Zealand and Australia and uh together with Studio Martino gumer and Atelier Luma team uh we started to die uh under valued uh wool started to look for new applications because this wool is not waste as such probably you cannot make a a pullover anymore out of you certainly can do other things it’s not only thermic interesting but also uh acoustic and interesting fire resistant uh working with rice rice panels to replace foam or using the leftovers of Olives uh to make uh profiles mix them with uh minerals ochers making these profiles that then became uh chairs and stools and that becomes finally an interior uh that is completely uh produced in a in a ccle of 70 kilomet around us so today I want to tell a little bit more about lwe uh can only say please come to to AR and visit us because then you really can uh experience it Helen had the chance um we did that project it’s 2,000 square meters uh renovation building together with BC Architects from Belgium and assemble uh from UK uh together we worked uh three and a half years together on uh a project that we called lwe and which is one of the buildings on the side um where we renovated this building um it’s not just a building it’s more like an ecosystem at the end I will uh tell you also a bit more about that it should flip but yeah that was too much of course this is how the building looked and we used the building itself as a as a mine uh so we had to excavate this soil and we used the the soil itself uh to make the new walls out of it here you see some prototypes um you see some structures that we build it ourself we had a chance also by Co to have longer residencies um of months yeah we work together for mon uh kind of and okay again uh and we made literally architecture together a Luma as developer of materials BC Architects working a lot with ramped Earth and uh uh bricks and assemble in uh collaborative modes all the designers that we and artists that are coming to Luma and Atelier Luma there’s only one condition if they come they have to collaborate not with us but with somebody in the region in order to create and develop uh a project so that’s the only condition that uh we put forward when they come so they come for a couple of days uh they look around they find something and then we let them connect with the region itself and that will be then later on implemented or used and uh applied light we used the construction site also as a place of learning because these techniques of ramped Earth and all kind of plasters that were done with alga and pigments um is something that is not rocket science but something that can be developed uh together with uh in workshops with the public from students to contractors uh over time so it was a site of learning a site of exchange and here you see some results how it looks at this moment we used uh The Leftovers of uh the uh the roof tiles that were broken and they became part of uh the floor of the terazo floor this is how uh the wall walls here are uh the whole building is isolated with rise it’s specked the whole uh outside walls are um uh uh termal uh isolated and uh with uh uh rice and sunflower is sprayed on it uh as a kind of acoustic uh and Flame uh flame retardant uh element all the the materials had to be certified um here you see some of the textile examples in the space sunflower acoustic panels and I think I’m at the end no what I wanted to show is that also uh I can tell you a lot about the natural ventilation in the building and how the building is climatized without any air conditioning that is really possible in the south of France it’s not uh that difficult you only have to design the building in such a way uh but also we T about uh the water cycles the gray and the yellow water cycles uh go into the AL Pond uh there we grow the alga we use the alga for our experiments um and uh we also uh use that to feed the garden uh with water so the whole building is not only connected uh with the whole wider region uh with the human and the material resources that are around but it’s also uh a whole ecosystem with uh the climate water and everything that is around it voila thank you very much thank you thank you so much Yan and yes I implore you all to visit all and the Atia because it really is the most outstanding example of how it’s possible with enough ambition and drive to make hopeful change so thank you so much and next we have up meing Loco Dr meing Loco is an assistant professor at Yale University’s School of Architecture and Yale Center for ecosystems in architecture and the founder of Willow Technologies in Acana as an arch tal scientist designer and educator from Ghana and the Philippines her work focuses on the D design and integration of just biogenic material practices across the agricultural AR architectural and textile sectors so thank you so much thank [Applause] you hi everybody I’m just waiting for my slides but while we’re doing that um the title of my talk today in relationship to the theme burnout is called when burnt out find a way to return home um and I was thinking about home not so much as a private asset or a retreat um from the world but rather a more expansive public sense of the idea where one does not have to retreat anywhere or hide from anyone or anything but really a way of being present being familiar safe and most of all responsible within a public cycle of Justice um mainly because I think Justice is what love looks like in public um so I guess I’ll uh just talk while my slides are not is it is it coming through okay all right give me a sec so anyway I’ve been thinking about um the relationship between our value system and Justice and really what are the ways in which we extract value from the land um how do we transform it with different systems of Labor um and how do we make that value exponentially beneficial to all sorts of actors and where does that value accumulate at the end of our material life cycles ah fantastic we jumped right to it okay great um and to a large extent uh if we look at the major economic IC and political systems that have emerged over the last three centuries what capitalism and socialism have in common is this top- down extraction this model of ownership that impatiently extracts everything from the land or our ecology and sequesters that Capital um with people who own um whether it’s the means of production um or a corporate entity and other actors throughout the entire framework get very little of that value and materially we see that at the very end as what people called waste right materials that are in the wrong place at the wrong time or we haven’t found a use for it and um the system is predicated on alienating um actors from each other so that value can be controlled so whether it’s us um in terms of not knowing who or what goes into the things that we use or all of us being alienated from the land or waste that um takes a long period of time to return safely back into the ology and we can see this in many different forms monocultures um Farmers or factory workers who get very little for the value they contribute to um larger material economic Cycles um and of course um textile agricultural plastic um waste many examples we’ve heard heard about today in the first two presentations and a lot of my work is really trying to occupy the underbelly of of that system um and for us Architects that have typically occupied that position um in between consumers and owners and driven that that extraction cycle even more strongly we’ve got to find new ways of operating um with this new resource essentially at as waste as well as with new actors who haven’t traditionally been part of this material economy so I want to talk about just three projects um that cut across a range of um co-products maybe that’s a better way of calling those materials as opposed to waste um and the through three steps and and the first is called taking the load off and most recently I saw this in the work of our fantastic Partners in Acra Ghana Ghana is the world’s second largest importer of secondhand clothing and a lot of that uh clothing is becoming poor poor poor in quality um and a lot of that secondhand clothing is sold in the markets typically on the top of um women’s young women’s heads as you can see in this photo here and the toll the burden actually um gets transferred onto the actual spine of these women when you’re carrying more than half your body weight um you begin to do damage to the human body um you know trying to transport that through um the market um but it also comes in the form of these large scale waste um I I work a lot with agricultural byproducts um most of my research came out of looking at the extreme quantity of coconut hus that are a byproduct of the coconut Boom everybody loves coconut water coconut oil coconut butter all of the above um and the byproduct is this really bulk dense husk which is found on the roadside and typically it’s illegal in GH dispose of this in the municipal Waste Systems there’s literally no wear for these materials to go because they’re so high in density that they actually end up ruining compactor machines which which is not so dissimilar with with what happens with secondhand clothing and so what begins is a land pollution problem very quickly becomes an air pollution problem because they have to burn this in open air at night in the city and so looking at the husk and thinking about all of the value if you can imagine what the husk has to do in the first life of a coconut it’s got to protect it from the Sun wind high salt environments all of that material intelligence is actually captured and it shows up if processed in the right way in a building material for example and so this is ook that not going back so this an example of an acoustic panel developed from coconut husk on the outside bounded with a soy protein binder soy is a byproduct again from a large um food industry and actually on the inside of that is um cornfed melium and this is an example of I would say a collaboration of different AG ultural byproducts um matching them to where they perform the best so Coconut’s very good at abration and mechanical strength the mycelium corn is super good at insulation makes the panel incredibly light and really reduces processing time to press it this way into sort of a Kit Kat um this is an example on the right side of a chair made from shredded um secondhand clothing made out of cotton which was just made actually like two weeks ago by my students in Ghana but very similar methodologies first of all take the load off the land and find other uses high value uses for these materials um and the scale of this resource is insane um it’s tied to our growth as a species the faster that um uh the more that we grow as a species the more food we need and the more of this resource we’re producing we produce about 10 billion tons of these co-products every year um they’re grown for our food food industry and about 40% of that goes into um is lost sorry and just to get a sense of how much that is everyone always asks is there enough uh just picture 10 million blue whales cycling every year renewable resource of materials that we need to find um better uses for um and if we look at the world’s largest uh produced crops it’s a very uh dense diagram but I just want you to focus on the first four because over half of everything grown for our food industry is either sugar corn wheat um or rice and to the big four disproportionately control um our agricultural sector and if we were to scale up the production or the use of biobased materials in those models um we will exacerbate some of the impacts we’ve seen like biodiversity loss and a lot of the unjust labor systems that have Associated themselves with the production of these C uh these crops um sorry I’m just going to try and Skip ahead very quickly to the second slide um one of the biggest things we’re realizing is that the husk any agricultural byproducts has a range of transformation Pathways it’s always imagining a a range of lives for these materials sorry it’s taking a bit of time uh but it sort of ranges from the mechanically strong and the more filtration desicant type applications so you get really high strength materials things that are quite similar to Oak in terms of mechanical strength that can come from a husk or stuff that is actually light and fluffy low density very good at holding moisture or air particulates so you can imagine this has huge implications for controlling humidity in a passive way in our buildings would be great in here in the summertime if it gets humid um or good at really filtering all of the indoor air pollutants that come off our contemporary building materials um and so this decision around which pathway is very much um based on the quality of the crop and what the local demands are because no coconut no plant is ever created equal and so beginning to uh become a way to become plant uh literate again is is key the second step is to find Old Friends who know the way and maybe this goes back to a couple of the Technologies both Kim and Yan were talking about um looking at fungi one of the most amazing Kingdoms of Life that have been responsible for um helping plants make their way from water to land and helping plants basically uh grow and spread throughout land territories uh today it also helps us break down the most complex materials in our environment um and so they’re an amazing collaborator for figuring out how to decompose some of our agricultural crops and also um develop them or transform them into products like insulation um the one thing I love about melium is there are millions of species and they’re not fussy eaters so there’s a lot of agricultural byproducts that can participate within a biodiverse sort of economy um all right I’m going to skip ahead since we’re running out of time but this is sort of the 5-day transformation of melium eating oh that’s awkward uh eating a hemp wow this is It’s clicker all right yeah um digesting a hemp curd and uh I work primarily with myum not so much as to produce the the the actual objects but to look at the ways um this low energy non-toxic way of transforming materials can be done um in a very accessible way so all you need is a sort of environment that can trap humidity and this happens at room temperature all of the food for the fungi is already within your agricultural byproduct um and so figuring out ways to prototype this distributed participatory method of growing this is a project in Liverpool um an entire exhibition with Urban Farmers uh middle school children about 200 participants growing a full tunnel Institue at Reba in the gallery itself and that’s sort of an example of the tun wow this is going so fast okay um one of the big things I want to say is there’s good and bad ways to do biobased uh production and you do this initially thinking hey you know we’re we’re coming up with something new but you realize that the actual carbon footprint of using all these Plastics of refrigerating um uh winds up making your your final product even more high carbon than the conventional and so really thinking about how do we make our melium base our strains even more biodiverse we’re prototyping with mycelium that grow in very specific areas around the world and eating waste that they would have been um familiar with in their ecology is sort of the shift that we’re trying to make in the work and last but not the [Music] least ah yes Luma was a big inspiration for expanding the the pallet for the fungi the last to to Really partake in a home-cooked meal together and this is sort of a metaphor for really thinking about um how our cultural rituals and our social practices everything we’re expecting from the materials need to change and how do we do that in a way that is desirable and food has been an incredible platform for for rethinking that um so this last project I’m showing is a collaboration with a chef um from Ghana one of the world’s top chefs lassia tadaka who’s been championing indous ingredients and um in order today develop that taste and building that sort of social acceptance for indigenous rice which has disappeared from the plate um we did sort of a large scale sort of public garden um in a part of the uh the country’s only remaining Green Park um where flooding happened and one of the most amazing things about the indigenous rice is their ability to be flood tolerant and deal with a whole host of contaminants that are already in urban water streams so this um sort of public park allowed people to be familiar again with rice they hadn’t seen in centuries it hadn’t been seen in the landscape um and they’re also grown with sister crops crops that um like the okra lemongrass that are all important in terms of the ecosystem around the indigenous rice and also developed a menu um which basically talked I can’t go through the whole menu but it starts off with um talking about all of the little ingredients micro ingredients that are part of the rice and coconut farming system um uh which you’ll see in a second um in order to educate every um dinner attendee who is part of the the final dinner exhibition so these were stakeholders along the value chain of the coconut and rice um industry in Ghana and also rethinking the way they could taste and um identify all of these ingredients in all the meals so this last meal was actually taking the waste product the thing that we don’t value at all the activated carbon uh coconut that’s burnt um and infusing that into Tiger milk and using that as a sort of sauce over a street food that is typically sold it’s called Kofi brokan if you’re broke all you get is plantain and ground nuts but it’s transformed into Kofi Richmond very different taste profile um very luxurious in terms of enacting all of the sensory aspects of eating this meal um in order to really trans transform how we we actually appreciate these materials so I’ll end there and thank you that was thank you thank you so much meing for that incredibly inspiring conversation and um just to see how possible it is to apply all that interdisplinary knowledge is incredibly inspiring so next up we have Manuel squa and Manuel is the has been the curator at the Guggenheim Museum Bill bow since 2016 in that capacity he has overseen major exhibitions such as Annie Alba’s touching Vision AR am my back yeah architecture effect co-curated with Troy tyrian Henry Mishu the other side squ has been responsible for the film and video exhibitions program at the gugenheim bilbow including Focus solo exhibitions by Amy Seagal Michael snow yavier Tes Diana Tata allor and car karda Alex Reynolds Jesse Jones Sharon lockart and Cecilia bolia he currently oversees sustainability related exhibitions and public programming at the gugenheim Museum bilb he is actively engaged in Academia and has an extensive lecturing record internationally having also served as an expert adviser to start the European commission’s Initiative for science technology and the Arts thank you so much so how hi everyone um thank thank you thank you everyone at I for organizing this um yeah so there are too many things I would like to say uh today so the idea is to give you an overview of the implementation plan for the advanced uh Advanced sustainability strategy uh at the gam B don’t don’t don’t skip it yet well since you did it go it um but stay there for a moment I hate not having the clicker it’s just like a okay neurotic thing you know um the idea is that we we’re going to change the focus because this is not so much the like the general terrain of application of sustainability and regeneration strategies in a world in transformation that as our colleague said I really admire all the things that they are pushing for but this is a a specific space of application which is a museum so um we have one thing in common with e which is that we’re part of the gallery Climate Coalition and as an active member which is a specific status there are only four uh art museums in the world that are active members and this is related to how difficult it is to do it at such a scale and with the specificities of what museums do um so there are several conditions you have to be able to measure your carbon footprint entirely have a green team um help me Kim and Publishing your exactly yeah ad mission statement that is like public yeah so um to give you an an idea that the first car food uh um full measurement of the carbon footprint was made uh from the data in 2021 so it was made in 2022 H it’s about 2700 tons of carbon uh produced by the go Hil Museum to give you an idea this is I mean a very large Museum the British museum uh in the same period uh produced 5800 uh so more than double and yet this is like very large these are very large structures a lot of energy goes into like climate control protecting artworks so some of the questions I would like to finish with today are related to what museums do and what they should be doing or how should we transform our own idea of museums and Society um for for for this to be realistic um next slide please so this is an image of bilau I don’t know how much you can see but bilau was an industrial town the ghim bilau museum has 25 years of History 50 years ago bilau was a der leaked post industrial town and 75 years ago it was was one of the largest steel producers in Europe it had one of the most polluted Urban Rivers uh in the world um when the museum opened it was not just the museum there was like a an extensive cleaning of the river there was a new airport uh and the industrial Port was moved out of town there was a whole set of Transformations and that Spirit has been kept for what’s going on now in let SL please um the idea today is that I will give you a sense of this um the the thing about the green uh group inside the museum is what of course brought me to the conversation but what I’m trying to convey to you is the result of the work of many people and not just Cally next slide um but on the curatorial level I would like to emphasize something which is going beyond the it’s like awareness Rising mission that museums seem to have as the only primary thing which is basically image making about sustainability climate change the crisis it’s like how can museums be something else um so next slide um I will give you an overview of all that is not curatorial uh work but you will get to see that this is all in progress so for instance for for light you know it used to be you know like you know old allogen light it was changed to LED all over um and that saves a lot of energy but now what we’re doing is trying to change to a dynamic system in which light is smart enough to consume locally and you know like for specific moments of the day when there’s more light in a room that is you know like that has skylights and so on and so forth uh for climate control is a little bit the same um we managed to reduce the levels but now we’re lobbying for museums to have a a more flexible uh standard in climate control you know museums need to keep like uh 20 Celsius a steady temperature and 50% of uh humidity in galleries well this is not exactly accurate this is a good rule if you don’t want to think but in fact what you have to avoid is like uh drastic shifts in temperature and drastic shift sh and humidity so if you maintain a level that is like you know smoothing uh then you can save a lot of energy because you don’t need to be so cool in the in the summer and so uh warm in in the winter and so we’re already doing this but we’re loving for this to become a standard so when we get a a very valuable artwork that is very fragile based on these standards we can obtain the loan instead of someone saying no because you don’t follow this and that um then um this is I can really read sustainable exhibitions okay so the idea is that of course we have to uh start by reusing all that we have so if we build for one exhibition then we keep that right so you know in the film and video program for instance like some artists ask me for uh a black carpet you know like it’s very important for the sound and blah blah no reflection so then we’re going to keep that black carpet as much as possible right and so we don’t accept anymore Thea oh this carpet is a bit shabby you know can you get anras side you know because it’s black you know and I hate black you know uh give me anite so we’re normally saying like no set is good you know this this rally is good you know it’s good for you it’s going to be good for the next and it’s going to be good for three exhibitions and then we will need to do the work and we paint white again we try to keep it as much as possible but now we’re changing to like well if do if we do new construction we will not use uh the typical you know drywall now we’re changing to cellulose and we’re working with a startup in Barcelona that builds cellulose to give you an idea of how important this is and how uh Stupid humans uh we are um you know like uh a cellulos wall has a has a LIF span of 10 years but a a normal Commerce a boutique uh has a lifespan you know average of five years so you know like even for sustainable materials you know we’re too fast um we’re also changing the type of spaint the type of paint we use so it’s not you know like so uh pollutant to produce it um and we’re Recycling and trying to find new lives and collaborating with organizations around for the things that we haven’t want to get rid of but you not really use use useful or uh sustainable next slide um next yes that’s it so um we’re measuring the the the full carbon footprint because that’s how you can reduce right you can be specific about what you’re reducing so now we are you know like um already in like this extensive reduction you know like transportation for instance you know when you have artworks from all over Europe you try to concentrate the transport not have one track for work um paper use uh so no leaflets uh new construction for temporary exhibitions almost zero and in my exhibitions I I try to do really zero uh dependence on fossile fuels the type of electricity we buy and so on and so forth we keep pushing um because this you know when you get a a company that does Renewables and non-renewables you know they it’s kind of tricky um water consumption has been also reduced and uh yeah to give you an idea of the climate control reduction is there so then now we have also charging posts for all staff cars so invite like we pushing for the St the staff to uh get electric cars instead next slide now uh for the curatorial goals am I going too fast or am I running out of time of both okay good so um the idea is not we of course we we keep increasing awareness okay there’s a there’s a crisis that is in progress and we will just see worse and worse versions of it soon but we also want to create impacts in Social transformation that and that that implies being actively engage in the uh social aspects of projects it’s not just like getting the work but also entering the process in which the works are made or the works are managed or the discourses are built um the idea is to promote uh transversal interactions between fields and therefore to to to create contaminations to to Foster contaminations so between art science and technology for instance as fields or forms of knowledge you know popular scholarly ancestral non-human Etc um and between disciplines you know like recently we had uh people speaking about geophysics from the perspective of sculpture or you know choreography and uh glassology or uh biochemistry and painting and so on so forth and then of course the the question of leadership in our plus d plusi research development and Innovation is like well but we are not an industry but we can be the place in which certain ideas can be uh sort of grown and uh that’s where you know like the funds of a museum I think are best used next slide please so these are just some examples of the programs that been happening in the past 3 years uh these are some of the exhibitions you all of them there was a direct impact on the questions of sustainability uh public programming related to them etc etc you will see some images I don’t have time to uh give you the the full description here but I invite you to ask me about any of these artists later um at the bar because every project had a specific I would say aggressive take on the rest of the program at the Museum so for instance both m al Kad and the Auto Group happened at the same time as motion motion was you know about the automobile history and art and architect Ure um and so I tried to address uh like fossile history and oil mythologies and so on with Mona and and the otol group the OT group was about uh the work was about soil but also about futurism as it was imagined from you know like India in the early uh 20th century uh and by the poet R tagor um material life was a section of the big collection show for the 25th anniversary um but you actually can you go through the slides just like like um on a you know sort of like um calm Pace but continuous um and those are some of the symposia that we’ve organized um what you see here are works in the collection stop here sorry um um you know like the the piece with the fog before has been there for 25 years is by Fujiko Nakaya and she’s one of the very first artist who work with a scientist in in producing a technology not an artwork and the technology was the invention of an artist that then used for artworks extensively so she she she created pulverized water um in collaboration with an atmospheric scientist this a work by Susanna Solano another artist in the collection this dates from 97 and the beautiful thing is that it already addresses uh plastic issues in the course of Africa she’s an activist uh in in in Bina Faso uh in the codir I mean diverse countries where she’s don’t not artistic projects but she collaborated with the populations in these initiatives and then the artworks were inspired by it so this is a as you see some sort of raft made out of plastic and steel next slide yes I wanted to focus this is good it’s fine um go for it not that one yes so this is a tree by yokono um I’m very happy that we did this because this is a wish tree she activates it next slide um once a year and people like hang their wishes this is an an outdoor piece and I want to I wanted to emphasize one fact by bringing in in indoors we we had a team of ecologists and people controlling the life and the stress of the three indoors but I wanted to emphasize in this show which was material life um how much a museum is hostile to living beings and how museums are made for the inert and the lifeless and I think that’s really scandalous and we don’t notice that there’s not one bug there’s not one single uh Spore in a museum so changing that I mean sounds uh fantastic from the perspective of regeneration as our colleague from no Institute yesterday said said regeneration is the next step is not sustainability but in a place that is basically born and raised in the extractive colonial Paradigm of European Centric uh culture well first you need to start proving that you know like this is a space of friction right and then of course we’re working on the next uh stage which is the last slide but uh please do one more this is the uh activated wi Tre um next this is the autoit groups uh work o Horizon oh Horizon is a is a is a is a layer of the soil in which the composition happens uh next this is mon alad holy quarter um mon speculates about you could see this piece maybe house it was produced by them and then we got it after after coid um she speculates about the mythologies of oil coming from like an alien origin and also instigating some mythologies in the kran I mean it’s quite hardcore um next because you know like she comes from Kuwait you know so like her family like um you know her grandfather was was a pearl diver and then next is you know like you’re anyway next next slide so this is a whole prototyping uh effort that we did with 15 universities in the framework of this uh automobile show with Norman Foster the idea is that we would project into the like the postc carbon Futures End of the 21st century and uh we collaborated with a lot of uh brilliant people in four continents of the world and uh um the idea was that some of these prototypes could actually be implemented uh much quicker and not necessarily by the automobile industry but but Mobility so like you know um interest in society uh at large uh maybe a couple more images yeah this is the project that we did with the University of Cape Town which was like the system I told you Ming about it yesterday right so yeah this is a so like individual mobile system that can be assembled in like little worms for like Collective groups um next slide and this is like a regreening uh machine to reforest areas that have desertified uh it was a project from the uh group of Yuma University next slide yes and this is from I think this one is from Yale actually they were very inspired by Nomad land you know and this idea that cities s like will be assembled and disassembled it was a little bit of burning month which is problematic and next yeah and this is a show by Y creso and we’re preparing for 2024 y works with like uh I think substantially anthropocenic material so there’s a lot of toxicity in the work but also there’s a lot of relationship to the body and it’s a constant friction between toxic elements uh new clean elements and I think you are telling me that yes so almost there okay next slide this is more un Crespo and next slide and this marinier we will be presenting this in October this piece is made in J at the gardens where Monet did his famous Nas is less known that it’s a completely artificial Garden that Monet bu at the same time as he was losing sight so it’s almost like a like a vision lens kind of tool and um and it’s called meow report playing with the idea that it was made exactly 50 years after The Meadows report which is basically the first report in which climate change was announced with catastrophic consequences 50 years ago you know a computer that was not as powerful as an iPhone could already say you know you guys are not doing it right nobody listen so therefore it’s still important to raise awareness but there’s something else to information right so last slide next one yeah two more yeah this is the site that is as you see an industrial site it’s a working at less than 10% at the moment this is where the gim BB is planning a new project in in which we will not try to build sustainable uh Museum practices but re regenerative and positive ecology um through Museum practices so this is like more a featurable but you know I leave it there last slide you know four quick questions what what is of cultural preservation and how can we rethink the necessities of collection so the question of transients what is the expected lifespan of a museum and its collection centuries Millennia geological time so the more than human history is how can we sort of like reconcile ourselves with that how can we reconcile exhibitions programming en large vegetation with ecosystem reparation and care I mean like yes you can do something amazing imagine like 300,000 people come see it and they ruin the landscape right any of our projects could suffer from that so the world is not helping in in that sense we need to we need to know how to do it so regeneration and in which ways can our institution practically connect with the goals it topically and thematically promotes so going Beyond representation all right that’s it thank you thank you so much Manuel I’m sorry to rush you we’re goingon to have to get you back for a full hour I think everybody on this panel but um no it’s fascinating and and it’s very inspiring for me personally from eever because we tried to implement all these changes into several different aspects of the institution but as a kind of very powerful large institution like the gugenheim bil bow you can really make this change and you can be really a spearhead in this we hope so thank you and last but very much not least is Julia belletti so Julia belletti is a researcher and cultural programmer her interests lie in the political ecologies of Contemporary Art institutions in particular with regard to processes of knowledge production she researches this subject in her doctorate at the University of Amsterdam and in in her institutional practice I at the Yan vanike Academy here she runs the nature research department and coordinates the future materials program a multi-disciplinary platform aimed at promoting and disseminating knowledge on sustainable materials for Art and Design practices thank you very much thank you Alan and thank you to the whole team here at Evac for organizing this wonderful event so I will try to add the farther layer of reflection to the already very inspiring um contrib tions a presentation of my fellow panelists and I would like to stay with the idea of how material relates to the system of values that were already like tapped by previous panelist um and especially like so my starting point into my presentation is actually the idea that materials are not passive are not silent matter but actually they speak about the system of values informing an institution and about how an institution relates to the modern human ecosystem it is part of so in case this might feel quite abstract and conceptual I would like to delve into an example to make it a bit more tangible and concrete next slide please yes so my example actually is this um photo by um conney um deser moris um artist and academic and it’s part of a series called solastalgia so I imagine at a let’s let’s like at first glance this um this image might might appear quite simple so it represents like a cement foundation with um edges on both sides there is actually like there is a road in the background um plants that are pushing through the cracks and some trees that are rooted in the loan um but actually for the ones of you who are more familiar with the work of um K theer moris actually the series solastalgia describes the slow violence occurring in her grandmother’s community in Mossville Louisiana a community that has been forced to relocate due to the deadly um level of toxicity released in the water in the air and in the soil of Mossville by the local um um well Plastics and petrochemical Productions but there is like a third reading that I would like to suggest to this image and actually I’m tapping into um an article by Ether Davis called uh plastic media in order to suggest this and it’s actually like so for someone with a more technical background this this image actually represents the result of petrochemical processes behind the medium of Photography and I’m talking about Celluloid film as well as the chemical behind the um process of development of negatives but also like if we think about the shift from analog photography to digital photography I’m thinking also about um well the fact that plastic actually constitutes 17% of most of um electronic devices such as as C digital cameras or smartphone but I’m talking also about the infrastructure supporting digital media as for instance the underground and underwater cable that are coated in plastic and that are like the invisible but still fundamental infrastructure supporting the internet so uh next slide please so what I’m trying to suggest here is not really like a radical critique of how plastic it’s been used and it’s it’s been used in in the Arts but it’s more um what I want to suggest is more like is is more to stress and highlight how actually oil and Plastics are fueling and supporting our words of imagination representation and art and actually how the like the materials that um that constitute artworks exhibitions and um and even the material infrastructure of Art institution themselves as a whole not only bear witness with processes of Social and ecological violence but they are also uh embedded add in uh certain principles that point out to the common Roots between um the certain words of art certainty institution and these processes of ecological and social violence and uh so like as as you can see here like step Stephanie Le maner argued how cultural artifacts and artworks are actually manifestation of what we might call uh fossil cultures and how actually the dependency of the artw on oil goes beyond the climate control of galleries beyond the art transport and Beyond like travel that takes the art crowd all over the world for bayos and and more um so I think like in the context of this panel I would like to stress how materials could potentially lead to um well first of all to acknowledge these entanglement but also possibly to suggest and Inspire like a reimagination in how we could potentially disentangle artistic practices and institutional practices from these systems of um um violence and destruction next slide please so and this leads me to uh present the project of today so uh what I just argued before are like some of the questions and thinking behind the future materials program at the Yan van Academy in m in the Netherlands so I will go quite quick now because the time frame is uh quite limited but I’m happy actually to you know delve more in into details about this program like um during the Q&A or afterwards so um the future materials program aims to uh support the ecological well the transition towards ecologically conscious art practices and um it’s like it’s it’s made by different components the core one is the future materials bank which is an online archive of materials and material project developed by artists and designers these materials are either like natural like natural dies circular as some of the materials already mentioned today or new materials such as for instance inks that derive from carbon captur from the atmosphere so they emerg from the intersection between science and art um well on the on the website of the future materials Bank we also have a lexicon and a material policy that are aimed not really to provide a universal knowledge about what sustainability is um but it’s more like to create um well the Lexicon a common understanding about certain recurrent terms on the website and the material policy more to guide practitioners who might want to submit their project but also our team in order to to go through and to make a screening of the project and an assessment next slide please so next to the Mater the future materials Bank we also have yes perfect thanks um so next to the Future materials Banks we have also like um a physical Dimension an offline Dimension at the yanan Academy this is like an image from the future materials lab where we have a small collection of material samples um from from the project um of the future materials bank and this of course is like um would like to offer possibilities to people visiting us to to have also like a more tangible connection with these materials to uh check their morphological properties their like aesthetic effects and and see how they reacts to humidity and how they could be implemented in different artistic practices next slide please yes um and then the future material bank and the future materials um lab so the online and the offline dimension of the project of the program are actually connected in the public program um which consist in the future materials en conts a program of Workshop uh that are built around the materials so they are like encounters with the materials beyond beyond the humans so we we we we invite one of the practitioners from the future materials Bank to meet our community and it’s really like a moment of exchange around and through the material both in order to share perhaps like more technical or Hands-On approaches to a material but also to have discussion and conversation about what what this material mean in relation to our uh connection to planetary Landscapes or uh planetary struggles and next to this we have more recently like um welcom some intervention from the artist in Residence and it’s something I would really like to uh continue who are interpreting our small collection of samples and the image here is by uh two current artists in Residence Kim David bot and sum vanan who uh created their own uh future material sound bank which was a lot of fun next slide please so uh something I would like to stress about future material is that um it doesn’t really aim to um to push for a linear transition um in in terms of like sustainability so it doesn’t want actually just to um to continue like with the example of the of the beginning of my presentation doesn’t want to substitute plastic fossil based plastic with bioplastic based on you know algae biobased plastic or many other kinds because we realize that actually if we do not change our approaches to production and our pace of production we just change the terms of the equation but we do not change the equation which is actually the problem or at least we believe it’s the problem um so like we we what I’m going to present now is actually like two examples of how certain material project that we have collected um uh might suggest really like other ways to uh think to practice and to engage with art in the context of single artistic practices but perhaps even in the context of an art institutions so the first one is the one you can see here it’s um so this is like um the practice by CL yra a Dutch designer and artist who um lives and works in symbiosis with um a Botanical die garden and a flock of um rare indigenous sheeps in the North in the rural north of the Netherlands so from the Botanical die Gardens she um she soures the pigments she uses in her tapestries and from the flock of sheeps um she obtains the textile fibers but beyond these let’s say nonhuman symbiosis modes there are also like a web of human relation she engages with which ranges from Farmers um Shepherds botanist but also historians and I want to stress the historians because what she’s also aiming to do is actually to preserve um knowledges and crafts that might have that might be forgotten in the accelerated pace of art production or textile production and this is actually like the the prin principle I would like to stress in relation to her practice how actually the temporalities of such a symbiotic mode of working um reconnect with uh more cyclical rhythms in tune with the natural Pro natural process of regeneration and uh and the seasonality of of the of like the more than human communities here next slide please Al po uh so yeah and this is like myum like this is like another example from melum which was was already like quoted different times today which is interesting um and we by this example I want actually to tap into the inevitable unpredictability of more than human collaboration so as you can see here this is like a block by the um the design Duo qu um and it’s basically like they didn’t really understand why they just like followed exactly the same process of previous myum pieces but it just like kept on growing and it eventually like sprout in mushrooms and fungi and this is actually interesting because even the most meticulous designer might experience in the OR artist might experience in their practice uh the fact that well the the unpredictability of a non-human agency and I think this is interesting especially thinking about like the the context of AR institution and and and galleries to um sort of reappraise our impulse to control uh to control process to control form and also to pref to preserve form for an definite um Horizon of time as it was already mentioned before and and here I’m tapping like into the separation between nature and culture and um and subject and object but mostly nature and culture in the context of art galleries and I think I’m like reaching the end of my presentation so I hope to have respected the time frame and oh next slide please yes um so yeah I hope to have like actually demonstrated how materials might they do embed certain values and how by using certain materials we might even really change the way we actually practice art and institution practice art in a deeper level so thank you very much thank thank you so much Julia I mean incredible work you’re also doing there I don’t think we’re going to stay too much longer on the stage because I feel like I can sense a bit of thirst every everywh so I think we’re going to maybe move over to the stam Tish for the kind of continued Q&A session but I just want to say a really really heartfelt thank you to all and for all the incredible work you’re doing and kind of ambitious and driven and determined and please please continue and I just wonder how we can work together better to kind of implement change quicker um I think Yan maybe said it once and my partner Pablo constantly says that there isn’t a energy crisis this is a crisis of imagination and sitting here it’s obvious there isn’t but how can we Implement that on a political level and Advocate an aggress to change quicker I think would be perhaps an interesting starting point at the table but thank you all so much and please don’t go too far because in 10 minutes we’re slightly late we’re going to have Vanessa andreotti who’s an incredible land um rights indigenous sorry land and Indigenous rights activist and author in conversation with chosy who is the head of theologies at Serpentine galleries in conversation here so in about 10 minutes please do come back thank you very much