Crafting Beyond Utopia: Bio-Materials and Poetic Futures

This course combines hands-on work with bio-materials like bio-plastics, and theoretical discussions on repair, healing and imagination. Participants engage in hands-on projects, challenge Western ideals and create "poetic futures" that celebrate transformative practices and aesthetics beyond perfection.

This course begins with a interrogation of Westernized notions of healing and repair that are often oriented towards ‘a better future’, and come with the desire to reproduce or get close to a former status quo. Cultural theory, art, design and architecture likewise have been engaging with this tradition. We set off from there, asking: Is it even desirable that bodies always fully and infinitely recover? Is it sustainable if mechanisms, ecosystems or infrastructures are again and again fixed, patched and stabilized in order to fully function again? But even if we move away from these utopian fictions of reproduction, repair, and healing: How to deal with their colonial, patriarchal and capitalist residues?

In a week-long process, participants engage with the ambivalences and speculative potentials of repair, healing and related practices such as curing, conjuring, mending, tweaking, bricolage, working around etc.  Learning about bio plastics and speculative design methods plays a special role in that process as well as creative writing methods to move towards “poetic futures”. Poetic Futures give value to phenomena and creative spaces beyond reproduction and productivism, such as dreams, the unseen, the unquantifiable, and radical interdependence.

Workshop Goals 

Participants will work in groups and on individual projects over the course of five days. Participants will read and discuss together, learn how to produce their own bioplastic and are introduced to a set of speculative design methods as well as the local Berlin art scene. Practical skills, theoretical knowledge and abilities to develop authorship are leveraged.

Methods 

Readings and inputs go hand in hand with a speculative design process that supports participants in developing and realizing an individual project, project sketch or prototype in a medium of their choice. Exercises include creative writing, prototyping and conceptual sketching. A special role plays the production of bioplastics with easily available materials in order to practically explore healing and repair beyond the reproductive paradigm. This process is informed by case studies from art, design, and architecture (e.g. The Great Repair, 2023; Natascha Sadr Haghigian: Beyond Repair, 2019) as well as writings by Gloria Anzaldúa, Ruha Benjamin, Lauren Berlant, Hélène Cixous, bell hooks, and Marina Vishmidt (provided in a reader). One or two excursions to an exhibition and/or artist-run space will address the role that context and community play to reimagine repair and healing.

Schedule

DAY ONE 

Close readings unpack and deconstruct what “healing,” “repair” and related practices may imply. A writing exercise and a speculative design exercise help participants identify a small project to work on during the course of the workshop. 

DAY TWO 

Sharing-round about participants’ project ideas. Setup of a DIY bioplastics laboratory. Artist talk by Petja Ivanova on her work with bioplastic skins. Participants learn how to make their own bioplastics with material available in drugstores and are invited to experiment with the materials and tools. Interim course reflection: group dynamics and individual needs.

DAY THREE 

Lecture by Annika Haas on the ambivalences of repair and healing as theoretical concepts alongside with examples from contemporary art, design, and architecture (possibly taking place in an exhibition). Writing exercise and discussion after the lecture. Work on individual projects on the second half of the day guided by speculative design methods to shape concepts and identify steps towards their realization. 

DAY FOUR 

Individual work on projects. Annika Haas and Petja Ivanova are available for consultation. Late afternoon visit to a gallery or an artist-run space in Berlin to talk about the role of community in relation to healing and repair (e. g. SAVVY Contemporary, Hopscotch Reading Room, Common Imprint); meeting with artist or curator. 

DAY FIVE

Presentation of final projects / sketches and feedback from the group. Shared reflection on learning and unlearning of repair and healing during the workshop. Composting/installing the remains of the bioplastics in a park and finishing with a small picnic. 

Prior application requirements

Participants are expected to read one up to three texts in preparation for the workshops.

Knowledge requirements

This course is for participants from all disciplines that have a general interest in practices of imperfection and speculation, and that are motivated to deconstruct and explore those on theoretical and practical levels. The capacity to understand and to communicate concepts and contributions to the course in the English language is required to follow the course.

Equipment requirements

No equipment requirements. Participants should feel comfortable to work in small groups.

Dr. Annika Haas is a media scholar, an art writer, and educator. Her research is concerned with artistic practices in a broken world beyond repair. She received a PhD from the Berlin University of the Arts with a dissertation about Hélène Cixous’s philosophy and writing through the body. Since 2020 she has been teaching at the Berlin University of the Arts. She works as a postdoc in the DFG-research group "Aesthetic Practice" at the University of Hildesheim. Her academic-artistic background is informed by a BA in media theory (University of Potsdam) and her graduate studies at the California Institute of the Arts and at the Berlin University of the Arts (MFA Media Art 2017). Since 2014, Annika Haas has been curating workshops, discourse events as well as exhibitions. Next to commissioned essays for exhibitions, Haas’s writing has been appearing in Texte zur Kunst, on the Critical Diversity blog as well as in performance art journals. She is the co-editor and author of multiple academic volumes such as “How to Relate: Knowledge, Arts, Practices” (2021). Currently, she is working on a book about group critique methods and on a book-length essay featuring case studies of artistic practices that respond to continued periods of catastrophic events, precarity, and instabilities in different regions and contexts.

Petja Ivanova, born in Bulgaria, is an artist, lecturer and performer whose practice is framed by her “Studio for Poetic Futures and Speculative Ecologies”. Seeking to overcome the linear and binary thinking that technology carries, Petja introduces poetic, emotional, mycelial and psychic relations to the living world into Computational Art. She studied Visual Communication and Computational/Generative Art at the Berlin University of Arts. Ivanova has taught speculative design at Linnaeus University (Sweden) and Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, where she received the 2021 Lecturer Award. Recent exhibitions include Soma of the Land at Museum Folkwang Essen, Broken Machines & Wild Imaginings at Akademie der Künste Berlin, New Now Festival, 3hd Festival - Echo Chambers and Our Data Bodies for transmediale Vorspiel 2023. Petja is a 2023 Human Machine Fellow at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.