People – Nature – Future

The artist duo Riitta Ikonen & Karoline Hjorth will give a live tour through the exhibition on ZOOM. They will talk about their on-going art project “Eyes As Big As Plates”, which explores our relationship with our surroundings and aims to reinforce the human connection to the natural world.

M. Sc. Sandra Rojas-Botero & M. Sc. Simon Dietzel, both PhD candidates at the Chair of Restoration Ecology, Technische Universität München (TUM) School of Life Sciences, Munich.

Sandra Rojas-Botero and Simon Dietzel will guide through the biodiversity of their installation »Wildflower strip« and will talk about the significance of native wildflower species in urban contexts, their role in urban ecosystems and their contribution to the quality of life and to the human-nature relationship.

Prof. Dr. Mark Wigley, Professor and Dean Emeritus at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, New York City, United States. Author of various books, e.g. Are We Human?. Co-Founder Volume Magazine. Curator of various exhibitions, e.g. Deconstructivist Architecture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

This talk will explore the uncanny fact that humans became insects at the end of the 19th century by sprouting radio antenna that rapidly interconnected all brains and bodies. This radical biological transformation culminated in the production of the single largest human artifact, the ever-expanding global communication system that wraps the planet — weaving itself through the air, underground, underwater, and outer space — yet remaining virtually invisible. The unimaginably vast and dense ecology of antenna took over from buildings to form the architecture of everyday human life. Yet the human has never simply been human. At the very least, the human is a bag of countless different bacteria, the fragile effect of a massive cross-species collaboration. What might be the entanglements between the largely invisible worlds of bacteria and radio? What might be “nature” in this scene?

Prof. Dr. Aletta Bonn, Professor and Head of Ecosystem Services, Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Friedrich Schiller University Jena and German Centre for integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig

Biodiversity is closely linked with health and wellbeing. The talk will explain the concept of ecosystem services as nature’s contributions to people. Specifically, the mental health and wellbeing impacts of biodiversity will be highlighted with various current research results. Building on this, links to policy, urban planning and management will be made and a discussion will be initiated on how nature conservation can be understood as a proactive health measure.

Dr. Uta Eser, Biologist & Environmental ethicist,
Büro für Umweltethik, Tübingen

Environmental communication predominantly presents conservation as a matter of human self-interest. In my talk I will argue that this “imperialism of self-interest” (Horkheimer) can be regarded as one root of the current social-ecological crisis. Against a purely instrumental perspective on the human-nature relationship, I propose a relational approach. Using Martin Buber’s philosophy of relationship, I present what characterises this perspective. A stronger consideration of such relational aspects would mean a fundamental shift in societal consciousness. Such a transformation might bring about the profound changes necessary to save both nature and humanity.

Dr. Lora Koycheva, Visiting Scholar at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich.

In this talk, Dr. Koycheva offers an anthropological perspective on the currently dominant human-centered design paradigm, and traces ways in which to dislodge it from its all-too-occidental grounding. She probes ways into which speculative methods and an anthropological approach play out in a nascent global initiative (Green Like a Robot) aimed at imagining, prototyping, and enacting the ways in which (ro)bots can help herald and enact such a paradigm shift. The centrality of the human has long reigned supreme in the explanatory models and creative endeavors that mark our collective experiences of being human, especially in the occidental tradition. What is more, such a tradition often relies on a well-tested heuristic mechanism – dichotomous relations – in order to both construct the world and organize these models of the world: nature-culture, human-animal, human-machine, animate-inanimate. Yet with the advent of the Anthropocene, as well as robotic technology, new heuristics, new methods, new vocabularies, and new responses to worldmaking will become not only necessary, but will also lend themselves to opening up new possibilities for existence.