esc return ↩ : Scripts for Degrowth, Buen Vivir and living otherwise
The symposium takes place at the 1st + 2nd of June and is part of our project „find.select.transform – Resiliente Netzwerke in einer verletzten Welt“.
find.select.transform
About the event
What does growth mean nowadays? In an era of planetary emergency, voices for scaling down and changing pace multiply. Terms like ‘degrowth’ –, post development and ‘buen vivir’ (well living) are used more and more to highlight the need to acknowledge planetary interdependencies and set boundaries to the use of earth’s limited resources. At the same time, people and states around the world do not hold the same responsibility with regard to the issue. How can we articulate responses together and establish dialogues across geographies, discourses and practices that are committed to living otherwise?
Esc return addresses these topics through a gathering of diverse practitioners from the fields of art, design and architecture. Discussions will unfold around: the possibilities of traditional knowledges and low tech; the urge for practices of care, repair and maintenance; the empowerment of commons - and community based economies ; the importance of situated, land practices. Esc return is not an escapism action or a coming back measure. It it is rather a call for a constant re·calibration process, a termination of a given script based on economic growth and a collective re·execution: A constant, yet still dynamic UnReLearning process.
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Program
detailed schedule infos please find here: findselecttransform.world
––––– SCHEDULE
14:00 — 15:00 Kinkurimba - Trust Economies
WITH Kabila Kyowa Stephane
Kinkurimba is a trust-based system of informal economy in which a group of people get together and deposit a specific sum of money each month, agreed beforehand between the participants, and each month one of them is drawn at random and the process starts again. If there is no trust, this system cannot work.
Kabila Kyowa Stephane will be using the kinkurimba as a metaphor to manifest the need for new forms of support between artists and outside them, given the crisis environment affecting many artists.The song “Pole Pole” by Jean Bosco Muenda Wa Bayeke will be included in the presentation because it speaks of the need to grow, even if it takes time, but in consideration of others with generosity. The expression Pole Pole means slowly, and refers to the need to appreciate the process, to not rush trying to find easier or faster ways. Kinkurimba, as a metaphor, will be an invitation to artists, curators and others to share other types of currency, such as time, knowledge, presence, a well-prepared meal, their work, knowledge and resources, whatever they may be, in order to establish other possible ways of satisfying our basic needs, such as food, water and art.
Kabila is a Congolese curator and researcher born in Dubie in 1993 and working on the African continent, with a Master's degree in Curatorial Practice from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Bergen. A member of CIMAM, he collaborates with the Livingstone Office for Contemporary Art (LoCA) in Livingstone, Zambia, and the Waza Art Center in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo. He is a consultant for Agency Kolkwen. Co-founder of NidjeKonnexion, a support platform for young artists in Lubumbashi, he is also a member of ARAC - Another Roadmap of Arts Education Africa Cluster, a network of researchers and professionals studying history, politics and possible alternative practices in the field of arts education. While completing his bachelor's and postgraduate degrees in Philosophy at the University of Lubumbashi, he was the coordinator of Cogito Litteris, a student association at the Faculty of Arts and Letters. Kabila has worked on the conception and development of exhibitions around the world. He is currently a Greta Henkel Foundation provenance research fellow at the Museum Am Rothenbaum in Hamburg, Germany, on a collection from the Kasai region in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His curated exhibitions include Bosolo, Kolkwen, Democratic Republic of Congo, 2023; Resonance, Zambia, 2023; Nzito, Kolkwen of the Lubumbashi
15:00 — 16:00 Night Light: Microbial Energy Dreams
WITH Hypercomf
Hypercomf, a designer team based on Tinos island, will present its ongoing projects, inspired by the cultural, environmental, and resource management challenges that small islands face. Through a demonstration of how to set up a Plant Microbial Fuel Cell (PMFC), participants will explore the intersection of microbiology, renewable energy, and environmental science—all within the compact space of a flower pot. This off-grid, low-tech system taps into the natural energy generated by soil microorganisms to power a small LED light, illustrating how simple, eco-friendly solutions could create meaningful impacts for both small communities and the environment.
Hypercomf is a multidisciplinary, speculative design identity, established in 2017 and based on Tinos island of the Aegean Sea. Hypercomf’s practice fosters interdisciplinary collaborations and community engagement methods of production, often including a range of biodiverse participants. The future of the relationships between nature and culture, between domestication and ecosystemic networks, tradition and technology, as well as the challenges faced by small island communities, are some of the research subjects that are set in focus.
16:00 — 17:00 Substance of Power — FOOD PERFORMANCE
WITH Gosia Lehmann
‘Substance of Power’ is Gosia Lehmann’s ongoing research project (in collaboration with Valerian Blos), which examines the relationship between chemical substances and power. The research materialises into a performative-dinner, where each served dish corresponds to historical examples of struggles of control and domination in context of exclusive substances. Gosia will give a little glimpse of the dinner-performance and make a small tasting.
Gosia Lehmann was born in the nineties in Poland, where as a kid she witnessed the transition between gray soviet blocks to Pizza Huts and McDonalds on every corner. Transition is a word which accompanies her throughout life– she is an artist in transit, traversing between the disciplines, she observes the construction of the narratives that rule our society. Back from her voyages, she creates multi-media spaces and participatory experiences, shining a spotlight on current themes and phenomena from the continuous emergence of reality. She works with food, film, performance and scenography. Since 2020 she runs the project space Solaris. Currently Gosia is a guest lecturer at University of Arts in Berlin.
17:00 — 18:00 Ex Soup & Astillas (Splinters)
WITH Javier Guzmán
Our built environment consists of once molten liquids, now cold and rigid. Plastics, asphalt, glass, concrete, metals, are former soups - now frozen - that were heated to hundreds, even thousands of degrees. Extracted from the planetary viscera and transformed with heat from the ‘high tech’ industry, these materials are eroded by use, consumption and waste and eventually end up ignored and neglected in fragments or samples (splinters) scattered in corners driven by chance.
Javier’s practice situates itself in a process where one is thrown into a flow of non-standardised materials, from randomly varying contexts and from past, present and future times. From here, Javier sets about the task of re·assembling using tools such as the sample (the splinter), collage and encounters in order to construct becomings from the library of variable memory that the residual reality of our cities throws at us. Sampling from the residual soup of urbanity is always experimental in the sense that the potential results are not given in advance. ‘By sampling we are splintering the consensual realities of each object to test its substance’, fissuring the routine and rational associations present in our everyday environment and creating new meanings. The sample, or splinter, found and used for its qualities as a constructive resource, inevitably contains the essence of everything that its original context in some way represented, communicated or touched.
Javier Guzmán Cervantes Based in Mexico City, Javier studied architecture and urbanism and has oriented his practice towards natural building techniques and the assembly of residual materials. His work revolves around the design and construction of architectural projects in rural contexts and furniture and utilitarian objects for urban environments, using the concept behind bio-construction and elaborating on how it can be placed in the contemporary metropolis. Through construction and assembly, his practice explores ways of rearranging elements of our immediate landscape to build integrated structures and functional objects, working from the idea of self-sufficiency and flexible design. Javier started ex soup, a design practice in 2022. In ex soup Javier builds domestic devices for autonomous living and infrastructures for the domestic space out of residual materials from the outskirts of Mexico City, promoting and revealing an urban vernacular.
Credits
the !Telepresencia event is curated by Ulrike Gabriel and funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion
