Multispecies Gathering Pond

Breakout Session 3: Friday 22 November 09:00 - 11:00
Michal Pauzner, Oded Kutok, Olga Stadnuk, Ginosar Wolf Hansel, Danielle Barrios-Oneil, Nirit Binyamini Ben-Meir, Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa; PADLab - The Post Anthropocene Design Laboratory. Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, Israel, Royal College of Art London, United Kingdom.

Dive into the ‘Multispecies Gathering Pond’ workshop – an immersive exploration aimed to shift participants from an anthropocentric worldview to a more ecocentric perspective. Addressing humanity's impact on the natural world, the session offers cutting-edge design-based pedagogical tools to foster a collective imagination of future possibilities. Set against the backdrop of a pond, participants will experiment with interactive and augmentation tools to assume roles as animals or plants. They will experience an AI-driven method for exploring how landscapes may transform through plausible climate scenarios, simulating a compressed evolutionary process through a real-time display. Participants will engage with collaborative methods, playing roles of other-than-humans, to investigate how communities might adapt to climate changes. Drawing on extensive experience in design, art, and pedagogical research, this workshop encourages innovative thinking, critical debate, and a transformative understanding of humanity's relationship with the environment.

materialXchange — transformation in presence

Breakout Session 3: Friday 22 November 09:00 - 11:00
Sara Burkhardt, Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design, Halle, Germany

Embark on an immersive exploration of regional identity, conflicts, and ecological challenges with the workshop ‘materialXchange’. Evolving from an online collaboration during the ELIA Biennial 2020, this physical presence workshop invites participants to bring objects reflecting their region's uniqueness. Participants need to bring along objects from their region which tell something about its particularity, its conflicts, its ecological challenges. This can be a certain raw material, a found object, a handcrafted artefact, or a particular industrial product. In Milan, participants interweave their objects with things they find in the city, such as colours, materials, topics, or artefacts. Throughout the session, objects become focal points for detailed examination, description, and contextualisation, creating a network rich in knowledge, associations, and narratives. Bridging sensitivity, knowledge, and aesthetics, the workshop advocates for material-based art education transcending boundaries into politics, ecology, and cultural studies. Concluding with a joint discussion, the session envisions a transformative impact on educational practices.

Journey into Relatedness

Breakout Session 4: Friday 22 November 11:30 - 12:30
Beatrice Catanzaro, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan, Italy

Methods to overcome the separation between inner and outer action, engender eco-social insight, and facilitate new forms of transdisciplinary Socially Engaged Art Practice. Embark on a transformative session, ‘Journey into Relatedness’, delving into the intersection of social change and individual mindset shifts. With a focus on redressing the oversight in Socially Engaged Art education, the session unveils methods fostering the interconnectedness between societal narratives and personal perspectives. Drawing from extensive practice and a practice-based PhD, the facilitator shares relational engagement approaches like 'collective self-reflective arenas' and 'situating glossary'. Participants explore 'image-word' dynamics, fostering intersubjectivity where individual and shared social contexts become dynamic realms of action. The aim is to cultivate a holistic philosophy promoting genuine self-other listening, laying the groundwork for an eco-social coexistence among humans and more-than-humans. Join this enlightening journey towards a nuanced understanding of Socially Engaged Art and its transformative potential.