Enough: Learning from Bio-Materials

#design #creativewriting

What happens when we take a natural residue, like an eggshell, long enough for it to teach us? Experimenting with the making of bioplastics and creative writing we will engage the possibility of tactile, relational inquiry and creation.

This 5-day practical and theoretical workshop explores what happens when we take one humble material — a bark, an eggshell, a piece of chitin — and stay with it long enough for it to teach us. “Enough” becomes a question of depth rather than quantity: How abundant can one matter become when we truly attend to it?

Through experiments with natural residues participants will engage with modes of tactile inquiry, relational ways of creation and the shift from knowledge production towards “knowledge creation” (Zuleika Bibi Sheik). We will make bioplastics and biomaterials — but more importantly, we will think with them. This process of making is interwoven with inputs and a guided process of reading and writing exercises.

Drawing from new materialist and eco-feminist thinkers such as Jane Bennett, Astrida Neimanis, and Stacy Alaimo, as well as alchemical and magical traditions, the workshop engages with knowledge concepts that undermine and question progress, (capitalist) accumulation, and newness as guiding research principles. Throughout the workshop, participants will be supported in reflecting on the norms and desires that underlie their individual research and artistic practices.

Participants will work in groups and on individual or collaborative projects. Participants will read and discuss together, learn how to produce their own bioplastics and are introduced to a set of methods from the areas of critical epistemology and creative writing. An excursion and/or a guest lecture will introduce participants to contexts relevant for the workshop topic in the local Berlin art scene.

Schedule

DAY ONE 

Close readings unpack the ways we know and approach processes of research and creation in the arts and design. A speculative design exercise will help participants identify a small project to work on during the course of the workshop. 

DAY TWO 

Artist talk by Petja Ivanova on her work with bioplastic skins. Sharing-round about participants’ project ideas. Setup of a DIY bioplastics laboratory. 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 

Guided reading and writing exercise by Annika Haas on critical epistemologies. Work on individual projects on the second half of the day supported by the course instructors 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 an exhibition.

DAY FIVE

Preparation of the final projects and presentation of projects, sketches and guided group feedback process. Shared reflection on the question of “Enough”. Composting/installing the remains of the bioplastics in a park and finishing with a small picnic. 

Prior application requirements

Reading 2 texts (15-20 pages)

Knowledge requirements

This course is for participants from all disciplines that are motivated to deconstruct their own approach 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. Depending on the participants, work in smaller groups can also take place in other languages than English.
 

Equipment requirements

No equipment requirements. Participants should feel comfortable to discuss in the larger group and to work together 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 and exhibitions, most recently Ungovernable Ingredients (silent green Berlin, 2024) and The Unworld To Come: Imagining An Otherwise… (University Art Galleries, UC Irvine, 2026). 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 polyvocal essay about artistic ways to imagining otherwise.

https://annikahaa-s.com/

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.

https://www.poeticfutures.com/