21 Visions for Eco-social Renewal Participants

Dr. Yasmine Abbas is architecture and design faculty at the Pennsylvania State University. She is investigating the making of environments for living across contemporary conditions of expanded physical, digital, and mental mobilities. She has worked in multicultural environments employing design thinking methods to generate pan-urban intelligence and drive urban innovation. She co-founded the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP), winner of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Centennial Innovation Challenge 2013, the 2017 SEED award for Public Interest Design, and Le Monde Urban Innovation Award — Citizen Engagement, Le Monde Cities (2020).

Born and based in Rio de Janeiro, Clara Acioli is an artist, researcher and designer who graduated from the School of Design of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She works at the intersection of the arts, design, biology and contemporary critical studies in search for new understandings of the world we live in. Since 2017, Acioli has been part of and collaborates with NANO lab – Nucleus of Arts and New Organisms, an interdisciplinary laboratory in the School of Fine Arts at UFRJ that articulates art with science and technology. She has been researching organic materials such as biodegradable composites and bioplastics to be used both in artistic and design projects.

(Photo: Elisa Maciel)

Erik Adigard is, with Patricia McShane, the founder of M-A-D, an interdisciplinary studio combining brand positioning, interaction design, visual communication and environmental design. M-A-D routinely works on the relationships between technology and socio-cultural concerns. Notable works include visual essays for Wired, media installations for the Venice Architecture Biennale, the book Architecture Must Burn and the branding of IBM software. The Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, Rome Prize in Design and Venice Biennale Special Mention are among Erik’s top awards. M-A-D’s work has been featured in major international exhibitions and publications, including SFMOMA, the London Design Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, and Meggs’ History of Graphic Design.

AHORA is a research and design practice lead by architects Linda Schilling Cuellar and Claudio Astudillo Barra, based in Santiago, Chile. Formed in 2020, it looks at extraction economies, with particular attention to the ones that take place in Chile, and asks what will happen after it’s all gone. To realize possible futures led by local communities, AHORA defends that we must understand the transformed landscapes inherited by the current economic value-ways through the lens of what was and what could be moving towards a post-extractivism scenario.
By looking at the documents that enclose most of the knowledge about the territories and the Environmental Impact Assessments, AHORA takes on new mediums of representation to visualize and discuss the impacts of extractions with local organizations and academia.  
Working in close collaboration with designers, biologists, and engineers, AHORA draws the story of a place through its human and non-human inhabitants’ relationships to challenge and propose new ways of being together.

à la sauvette is a multidisciplinary architecture collective born in the Canary Islands. Established in Las Palmas, Seville, and Harvard University, their practice explores the intersections between spatial design, territory, and society. Their ongoing research focuses on the role of collective celebration in the public space and its agency as a political act. It studies the party as a mechanism for claiming collective identities in public, as a means to socio-spatial equity. à la sauvette was awarded in the XIV Spanish Architecture Biennial 2018, in Concentrico 04, first prize in ASA 2019, and received the Future Architecture Fellowship 2021 with their project Dance is Politics.

James Bridle is a writer and artist working across technologies and disciplines. Their artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. Their writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Observer. New Dark Age, their book about technology, knowledge, and the end of the future, was published by Verso (UK & US) in 2018, and they wrote and presented New Ways of Seeing for BBC Radio 4 in 2019. Their work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com.

(photo: Michael Lundblad)

Vienne Chan approaches money as a medium of social sculpture and seeks ways of re-imagining it to better address social needs. She has held a European Media Art Platform (EMAP) residency at m-Cult in Helsinki (2020), a Weisman Art Museum Creative Collaboration residency with the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota (2019). Vienne holds a MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from Bauhaus Universität Weimar, and was a recipient of a Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Scholarship. She is currently on the editorial board for the peer-reviewed journal, Money on the Left. Vienne lives in Duisburg, Germany. 

Sonia Mehra Chawla is a multi-disciplinary artist and researcher based in New Delhi, India. Chawla works at the intersection of art, science and technology, exploring themes of ecology, sustainability and conservation. Sonia’s practice is inextricably linked to an ethic, even a politics of multi-species co-existence and co-habitation. Her research is a political act, in which she collaborates with climate-change scientists, ecologists, microbiologists, as well as fishermen, farmers and indigenous people who speak from the deep reserves of their traditional wisdom.
Chawla is a fellow and awardee of the Charles Wallace India Trust of the British Council. She is a fellow of the International Art+ Science International residency program instituted by Wellcome Trust UK/DBT India Alliance & Khoj, India. Furthermore, Chawla is a fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, for Social Sciences. Her forthcoming project in Scotland, has been supported by a research fellowship from Marine Scotland and ASCUS Art & Science. Chawla’s work has been exhibited at, among others, the Yinchuan Biennale 2016, China; Essl Museum, Austria; Tate Modern, London; Albertina Museum, Vienna; ET4U Contemporary Visual Art Projects, Denmark; Yinchuan Museum of Contemporary Art, China; CSMVS Museum, Mumbai; Today Art Museum, Beijing.

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng is a transdisciplinary design researcher, whose path meanders through architecture, anthropology and visual art. Cyan’s practice does not dwell on a defined subject matter, but rather as a form of personal enquiry, and indeed, struggles. Driven by an urge to unsettle the domination of all those constituted as others, the wide-ranging themes include, non-canonical histories and socio-spatial models, diverse ways of cultural knowing and being, aesthetic agency, and modes of co-existence and affinity between human and non-human. Her work received commendations by the RIBA President’s Awards for Research from the Royal Institute of British Architects, in 2018 and 2020, respectively, and has been exhibited at Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics (ZKM, 2020-21), Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2019), and Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), among others. Cyan co-leads an architectural design studio, ADS7, at the Royal College of Art, exploring politics of the atmosphere. She holds a PhD by Design from the Architectural Association (AA) in London, and was the co-director of AA Wuhan Visiting School (2015-17). Cyan is currently working on a short film with Chen Zhan, Orchid, Wasp and I, a dystopian story seeking to unsettle the anthropocentric practices that exacerbate the climate crisis.

Andrea de Chirico was born in Rome and is based in Turin (IT). He holds an MA in Social Design from Design Academy Eindhoven and a BA in Industrial Design from ISIA in Rome. His work focuses on the intersection between conventional, traditional and modern making. He designs tools, systems and objects with social and environmental awareness, always linked with a rigorous analysis of the context. His practice is open and accessible, creating a platform to connect with different groups internationally, remodelling everyday products for different contexts.
Appointed as researcher at Free University of Bolzano from 2016 to 2019 and Designer in Residence 2016 for the Design Museum in London, Andrea’s work has been exhibited in the Design Museum in London, the Triennale Design Museum, and Z33 House for Contemporary Art among others. De Chirico lectures in various universities and institutions such as University of Bolzano, NABA, University of West England, New Designers in London and Design Connections by the British Council.

(photo: Max Creasy)

Joseph Halligan is a founding member of Assemble, a multi-disciplinary collective, which formed in 2010.  Focusing on work in the arts, Joe has designed and delivered a number projects including much of the collective’s work in Liverpool, for which they were awarded the Turner Prize in 2015.  Joe has lectured and taught internationally at a variety of universities including Yale, Cambridge and the ETH in Zurich.  Joseph was visiting professor at the EPFL in Lausanne from 2020-21.
 Joe has recently completed the design and delivery of a new permanent gallery at the Wellcome Collection in London and is currently working with the Luma foundation in Arles on a new workspace for the experimental think tank, production workshop and learning network, Atelier Luma.

Elise Misao Hunchuck (b. tkaronto/Toronto) is a landscape researcher, editor, educator and curator trained in landscape architecture, philosophy, and geography (University of Toronto, CA). Based in Berlin and Milan, her research uses cartographic, photographic, and text-based practices to document political ecologies, exploring material landscapes and relationships between resources, infrastructures, natural processes, human and other-than-human existences. She is a Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art School of Architecture, a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at The Bartlett School of Architecture, London, and a member of the editorial board of Scapegoat. She is also the editor and a curator for transmediale.

Initiative for Applied Melancholy (Barbara Boss, Damiàn Dlaboha, Maximilian Grünewald, Mira Hirtz and Béla Rothenbühler) have found each other through mutual projects and their shared aim to develop a theatre of the anthropocene in their fight against the crises of humankind with the means of performative arts. 

Matylda Krzykowski plans, design, writes and talks about physical and digital space. Her transdisciplinary work focuses on developing cultural and commercial formats that range from exhibitions, installations and exhibits to choreography, talks and video, to name a few. 
Krzykowski writes Things Might, a column about the built environment, for Arts of the Working Class Magazine. She is one half of Foreign Legion, curatorial and spatial initiate for systemic change. Recently she wrote a concept for a process focused museum for Omer Arbel titled The Ongoing Museum, an essay titled Opening the Digital Interior for the journal of The Centre of Philosophical Technologies and co-curated and developed the scenography for the exhibition Total Space at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich. She scripted and moderated AIRTIME, Internet TV Show about contemporary (Swiss) Design, as responds to a request for an online exhibition.  
Currently Matylda Krzykowski is the curator of Civic, newly established exhibition and discourse platform at Academy of Art and Design in Basel and co-curator of Institution Building at Civa Brussels.

(photo: Diana Pfammatter)

Katja Meier studied education at the University of Lüneburg with a focus on educational work and social pedagogy, dealing with the interface between social and cultural work. She currently works at the Theater Lüneburg, and as a freelance theater pedagogue for the Thalia Theater, where she leads the inclusive theater group Eisenhans. At Theater Lüneburg, she is responsible for the youth clubs, the accompanying program for the Jungen Bühne, and dramaturgical introductions. With the music theater director Kerstin Steeb, she has recently created the opera film Der Wald, based on an opera about right-wing mindsets in Germany by the British composer Ethel Smyth.

Kay Meseberg was born in Bad Belzig in East Germany studied political sciences at the University of Potsdam. Parallel to his career in television, he has been involved since the late nineties in conceiving and implementing numerous award-winning online projects and building platforms. He moved to ARTE in 2013, where he developed the platform ARTE Future and later joined the editorial board of the magazine SQUARE IDEE. Following the success of Polar Sea 360°, he continued exploring content from a 360° video and virtual reality perspective. Kay is since 2018 Head of Mission Innovation and works on the TV of after tomorrow which includes subjects such as data/AI, immersive media, eco-responsibility.
Kay received numerous distinctions, including three Grimme Online Awards, Deutscher Reporter- preis, two times Deutscher Wirtschaftsfilmpreis, LEAD Award, French-German Journalism Award. He is also Ambassador of Innovation at the IMZ in Vienna, cofounded by UNESCO, and member of the Board of Directors of the ICC association ACCRO in Strasbourg. He held masterclasses, keynotes, lectures, participated on panel discussions at top international universities such as Yale, among others. 
In 2019, he published with Regina Kaplan Rakowski: Immersive Media and their Future, a chapter in the Yearbook of Educational Technology and Media, Springer. 

Nonhuman Nonsense is a research-driven design and art studio creating near-future fabulations and experiments somewhere between utopia and dystopia. They seek to transmute our relationship to the non-human, by embracing the contradictory and the paradoxical — telling stories that open the public imaginary to futures that currently seem impossible.
Nonhuman Nonsense work in the embryonic stages of system transformation, in the realm of social dreaming and world-making processes. Aiming to redirect focus to the underlying ethical and political issues, to challenge the power structures that enable and aggravate the current destruction of the (non)human world — allowing other entities to exist.
Founded by Leo Fidjeland and Linnea Våglund, it is based between Berlin and Stockholm.

(photo: Sara Kollberg)

DK Osseo-Asare is principal of transatlantic architecture studio Low Design Office (LowDO), is an Architectural League of New York 2021 Emerging Voices award-winner, and assistant professor of architecture and engineering design at Pennsylvania State University where he directs the Humanitarian Materials Lab. He co-founded the pan-African open maker tech initiative Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP) and led urban design for the Anam City and Koumbi City new town projects in Nigeria and Ghana. He is a TED Global Fellow and received his MArch. from Harvard GSD. His research explores material assemblies optimised for massively scalable radical resilience.

Alexandre Quessy is the director of Art Plus Code Inc, a Canadian company that does software development and user experience design for innovative and artistic projects. He has worked as a software developer, and as an artist and designer since 2003. Quessy works as a senior software developer, business analyst and UX designer every day. He’s acting as an agile facilitator to manage teams of developers and designers. Over the years, he has worked as a developer in different teams, namely the Society for Arts and Technologies (SAT), Autodesk, D-Box and Boeing, to name a few.

Manuel Rivera studied sociology, philosophy and Latin American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and at the National University of Buenos Aires. After receiving his diploma (master degree) with a thesis on environmental awareness, he served as a project officer for the German Council for Sustainable Development (RNE), Berlin, and, temporarily, for the European Network of Environmental Advisory Councils (EEAC), Brussels, until 2007. The following years he worked as an actor at several German municipal theatres, before returning to sustainability issues by joining IASS in March 2011. In 2015, he obtained his PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Stuttgart, with a study about Theatre as a Political Public Sphere.
At the IASS, he has been working on issues as different as urban studies, Latin American alternatives to development, the German energy transition, or the idea of Nature in the Anthropocene. He co-lead the Economics & Culture program from May 2015 to December 2016, inter alia conducting a study about attitudes toward economic growth in the German Bundestag. Currently, he leads the project Narratives and Images of Sustainability, with the focus on a critical analysis of current academic and political sustainability discourses.

Anne-Catherine Robert-Hauglustaine is the General Director of the Air and Space Museum, Paris-Le Bourget since 2017. She is also Adjunct Professor at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, History UFR, Heritage and Museums Master, and Member of the Academy of Technology. Anne-Catherine is a Research Associate at the CHS, Centre d’Histoire Sociale du XXe Siècle (20th Century Social History Centre), Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her professional career includes positions as General Director of ICOM, International Council of Museums, Paris; and General Director of MuseDoma, Paris. She was also Director of the Exhibitions and Publications Department and member of the Executive Management Team of the Musée des Arts et Métiers (in charge of partnerships and sponsorships); and Editor-in-chief of the Revue du Musée des arts et métiers, among other positions. Anne-Catherine received several international awards, and authored more than twenty publications in prominent journals.

Chris Salter is an artist, Full Professor for Design + Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal and Director of the Hexagram Concordia Centre for Research-Creation in Media Arts and Technology. Trained in economics, philosophy, theater directing and computer music, his performances, installations, research and publications have been presented at festivals, exhibitions and conferences around the world. He is the author of Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (MIT Press 2010), Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making (MIT Press, 2015) and the forthcoming Sensing Machines: How Sensors Shape our Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2022).

(photo: Ankeburger)

Eylül Şenses graduated from the Architecture Department of Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey, and she participated in a one-year exchange program at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Spain. After taking part in various projects with the design collective called Plankton Project, she worked as a program coordinator in TAK Kartal, a creative hub empowering collective decision-making processes on an urban scale. She worked as operations and public programme associate at the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial realized by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV). She received a master’s degree from the architecture and urban studies program, Kadir Has University (KHAS). She took part in research and exhibition projects within SALT and KHAS. Recently she has worked as a public programme associate at the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial and has been part of The Young Curators Group established within the biennial. She is one of the founding members of the Urban Studies Cooperative (Urban.koop), a collective network of urbanists, artists, and creatives who are willing to co-develop urban policies, programs, and projects for the local communities.

(photo: Deniz Gün)

Jaime Sevilla is an explorer of the weirdness of reality. His work spans communication with alien artificial minds, building tools for precognition and helping humanity flourish.

Soft Agency is a diasporic group of female architects, artists, curators, scholars and writers working with spatial practices. The agency’s work is rooted in feminist methodologies practices and formats, in the intersection of critical spatial practice, radical pedagogies, collectivities of becoming otherwise and alternative modes of participation. Through the creation of spaces, workshops, events, exhibitions, publications and public programs, Soft Agency seeks to disrupt and re-imagine the lively entanglements through which civic life is organized, rethinking economy, political relationships and social bonds.

Sonic Acts of Noticing was developed by two architectural designers and educators, a sound artist-researcher, and two web design-researchers. The team come together to explore the potential of foregrounding the sonic in the creation of emancipatory spaces. Operating at the intersection of practice, teaching, and research; the material, the sonic and the virtual, in order to find modes and sites of intervention that will support collective learning and transformative change. 
Julia Udall leads fourth-year M. Arch at Sheffield Hallam School of Architecture, and third-year history and theory. Her research explores commoning, engaged architectural pedagogies, and the ethics and politics of spatial design.
Jonathan Orlek is an architectural researcher and practitioner. He has recently completed a collaborative Ph.D. between East Street Arts and the University of Huddersfield, which used embedded ethnographic methods to investigate the provision of housing by artist-led organisations. Julia and Jonathan are directors of social enterprise architectural collective, Studio Polpo, and have both taught at Sheffield School of Architecture, in the M. Arch and MA Urban Design. 
Alex De Little is a sound artist and post-doctoral researcher at Nottingham and Leeds, and an honorary fellow at Goldsmiths in the Department of Music. His practice encompasses installation, composition, and workshops, and he has recently exhibited at the RCA, National Science and Media Museum, and East Street Arts Leeds. The three initially came together in developing “The High Street of Exchanges,” as part of the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021 “The Garden of Privatised Delights.” 

(photo: Camille Blake)

Juan Pablo García Sossa (JPGS) (*Bogotá) is a designer, researcher and artist fascinated by the clash between emerging technologies and grass-root popular culture in tropical territories. His practice explores the development of cultures, visions, realities and worlds through the remix and reappropriation of technologies from a Tropikós perspective (Tropics as Region and Mindset). JPGS has been part of diverse research institutions and design studios and currently is a design research member at SAVVY Contemporary The Laboratory of Form-Ideas’ Design Department in Berlin and Co-Director of Estación Terrena, a space for arts, research and technologies in Bogotá. JPGS is a 2020 Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellow at EYEBEAM.

(photo: Raisa Galofre)

James Taylor-Foster is a writer and cultural critic trained in architecture. He is the curator of contemporary architecture and design at ArkDes, the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design. In 2016 he co-curated the Nordic Pavilion at the 15th Biennale Architettura di Venezia and in 2018 participated in the central exhibition at the 16th. He has developed a number of curatorial projects in Stockholm including, most recently, the first museum exhibition to explore the culture and creative field of ASMR. He was formerly editor-at-large for ArchDaily.

(photo: Elsa Soläng)

Matthew C. Wilson is an American artist, filmmaker, and researcher based in the Netherlands. In Wilson’s films/videos, sculptures, and installations viewers encounter a range of agents and intelligences entangled in natural processes and shape-shifting historical forces. His projects utilize research-based, site-specific, and methodologically eclectic approaches to track the inertia of Modernity — through contemporary ecological crises and technological transformations — into speculative futures.
Wilson holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in the City of New York and undergraduate degrees in Literature and Art/Design from North Carolina State University. He has been a participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and numerous residencies including Aalto University, Jan van Eyck Academie, Tabakalera, Terra Foundation, CSAV/Fondazione Antonio Ratti, and Skowhegan. His work has been supported by grants, fellowships, and commissions from Mondriaan Fonds, Forecast Platform, Kone Foundation, Talbot Rice Gallery at Edinburgh University, and the European Commission through the NEARCH project. His moving image work has screened on Vdrome.org, at IFFR — International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, and Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, among others. Gallery exhibitions include: Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, NL; Marres, Maastricht, NL; Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool, UK; and The Brooklyn Rail Curatorial Projects, Brooklyn, New York, US. Wilson is currently a tutor in the F for Fact MA at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, NL.

Chen Zhan is an architect, anthropologist and independent filmmaker. Chen’s film practice focuses on the socio-political struggles of the marginalised through the lens of the everyday. Her short documentary, Ahmad, tells the story of a Lebanese asylum seeker who rebuilds his life through cooking and food-sharing. The film debuted at the London International Documentary Festival (2019). Her anthropological research develops a critical analysis of future-making at the intersection between design, material culture and consumerism. In architecture, Chen was dedicated to the realisation of Maggie’s Cancer Care Centre in Leeds. Chen is currently working on a short film with Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Orchid, Wasp and I, a dystopian story seeking to unsettle the anthropocentric practices that exacerbate the climate crisis.