From November 25–27, 2022, Driving the Human realised a three-day festival marking the culmination of three years of collaboration, research and experimentation, connecting disciplines between sciences and the arts. Hosted by Forecast at silent green in Berlin, the festival featured at its heart seven tangible prototypes that responded to our current planetary moment, enabling new ways of envisioning and inhabiting the world. As member of the European Architecture Platform LINA, the project is part of the 2023 LINA Programme and has involved three selected Fellows, Jonathan Steiger, Tevi Allan Mensah and Studio Inscape, who were invited to engage in transdisciplinary thinking and transcultural collaboration through knowledge exchange within the framework of the Festival.

In this interview, Freo Majer, founder and artistic director of Forecast, and the three Fellows talk about the importance of interdisciplinary work for cultural change, the revision of ecological models and the importance of framing new collective imaginaries.

KOOZ The Driving the Human festival brought together various disciplines, including sciences and the arts, to showcase seven prototypes for eco-social renewal. What informed the multidisciplinary nature of the project? How pivotal are these cross-disciplinary collaborations to better understand and respond to the climate emergency?

FREO MAJER We humans all live on the same planet, we breathe the same air and consume the same finite resources. Why shouldn't we work together on healthy, meaningful and sustainable forms of coexistence, each with their own cultural, professional background and based on their personal mentality, worldview and way of working? Dividing into "disciplines" or responsibilities inhibits and even squelches free thinking, the capacity for fruitful cooperation and any kind of innovation. Working on Driving the Human has confirmed for us that artists can often create strong, passionate and emotionally moving associations and trains of thought that can stimulate scientists in their way of working and give them new ideas. Conversely, scientific practices, with their precision and clarity, often offer artists important thought material that may cause interesting frictions, reasons to doubt and start anew. Contradiction and doubt are important elements of transdisciplinary work and they have been very productive and instructive for the project from the beginning.

KOOZ As LINA fellows, you were invited by Forecast platform to participate in the conversation “Centering Sustainable and Circular Practices” within the Driving the Human festival. How do you approach notions of sustainability and circularity throughout your practice? How has your collaboration with LINA and the participation in the Driving the Human festival informed your approach to these terms?

JONATHAN STEIGER As an artist, I work with layers of meaning and cultural constructs rather than with actual matter. Let’s take my investment in landscape for example. It is crucial to understand that landscape already entails a value judgement. Some places receive the attribute “landscape”, while others appear as too human-altered, too unnatural to be considered landscape. This leads us to the question: which places do actually benefit from the sustainable and circular practices we talk about? Is it just places that already have a scenic value, that look like “nature”, or do we also include the neglected sites, like places of industrial agriculture? So, to redefine landscape is simply one building block in the cultural change towards more environmentally and socially just practices. LINA connected me to many practitioners that work on the more executive end of this cultural change. For instance, to learn from Studio Inscape how decision-making processes could be reinvented was extremely valuable to me.

TEVI ALLAN MENSAH For instance, I am very much interested in the borderline that Studio Inscape evokes. My work, as an architect but also a visual researcher, is about reflecting on the possibility of these “in between” spaces. Moreover, in its different realities, these borders are materialised in a rather strange territory that could be physical or conceptual. I work then more on the imaginary, I would say, as my work focuses on highlighting possible new narratives on those spaces.

The Driving the Human invitation last November was a unique opportunity to see my current project, borderlands, in a whole new perspective. The promises of the seven prototypes for eco-social renewal have crossed my collages in many ways. At this time, we are facing a crisis of the three ecologies, the search for new models is essential. While some would seek to find our salvation in forgotten methods, past systems of governance, I think the emergency is simply to reinvent ourselves.

KOOZ Studio Inscape was selected by LINA with the project Oosterschelde Negotiation, a “serious game” which, by placing humans and non-human agents around a democratic arena, aims to level the field on the decisions taken in the management of the southwestern Delta region in the Netherlands. What informed the format of the game? To what extent do such mediums facilitate conversations with other participants and individuals (and in turn the possibility of conveying a strong message)?

STUDIO INSCAPE Because we deal with decision making processes we are fascinated by political spaces. These spaces are often indicated by specific table settings. The table as a typology to listen, be together and discuss ideas and proposals came as a natural format. The round shape, without hierarchy, and the size being large enough to project things on and listen to everyone, all facilitated “room” for conversation. Also, rather than standing, it is a moment of rest and focus. Yet, we are aware that the table is a typical human object with standardised sizes. For following projects, we are searching for new “table settings” to host similar conversations that allow for a better immersion with non-human agents around us—be it small scale soil-life (e.g. worms or mycelium) or large scale topographical elements (e.g. sandbanks). As designers and architects, we are drawn to spatial arrangements and always try to look for new configurations. The round table has proven to be a good conversation starter and a move for more inclusive ways of acting with(in) our environment.

KOOZ Jonathan, your practice and approach spans across diverse media, from video, to photography, to sculpture and writing. Specifically, within the contexts of LINA, you decided to focus on anthropogenic landscapes throughout the Netherlands documenting these via both video and photography. How did you deploy these mediums to unveil the landscapes “humankind” wants to dispose of, but which always come back”? What is the value of redirecting the human gaze to these wastelands?

JONATHAN STEIGER My filmic and photographic work often takes the form of a travelogue or a romantic journey. The spectator is lured by this familiar format but then gets presented with places that don’t fit the common expectations. In the photographs I showed in Berlin, we see the Netherlands as a landscape of hills instead of a flat territory. Obviously, these hills are mostly landfills, which stem from a modernist understanding of architecture, where all the waste and excrements are directed outwards: out of the building, out of the city. The strategy was to hide this matter from view, for the sake of an aseptic and smooth living environment. When we turn our gaze towards the sites where defunct matter is deposited, we find that next to the often detrimental impact of waste, a lot of life emerges. This is life in a biological sense, but also social and cultural life. It is important to overcome this separation between functional landscapes and wastelands. Instead I believe that every place is to some degree marked by defunct matter of the past, so we better find a way to dwell among the detritus.

KOOZ Tevi, within the context of LINA and the Driving the Human festival you focused your research on borders stating that “any architectural act creates a border” and that borders are “not something negative, but as a territory of possibilities.” As an architect and visual artist who works at the intersection of architecture and artistic creation, how did you deploy both installations and temporary projects to writing and drawing to unveil these possibilities and reframe the border as a site where we are able to change perspectives?

TEVI ALLAN MENSAH That “purposely” laconic postulate about the border is the point of departure of borderlands. That statement allows us to consider the border as an element that can take multiple scales, all very much related to architecture. If we are the first agent of that act of border, maybe the project can be used as a tool to change our perspectives. I strongly believe that the first step to tackle the challenges that we face today is to create new collective imaginaries.

For the border, my work often focuses on the possibility of a project. I then try to document or to highlight the eclectic interests of the border territories. It can be shown as a collage for an impossible project, the drawing of a tiny detail, the installation of a place to meet at the border…

The most important thing about what the border can promise is that because the line is something that separates, it is also something that is common and shared.

KOOZ How did the three-year programme and ultimately the final festival itself enable new ways of envisioning and inhabiting the world? What are your expectations for the seven prototypes in the long term?

FREO MAJER The three-year funding from the German government has given Driving the Human the opportunity to not merely speculate, but to produce something tangible. In our opinion, mere analysis and speculation happen more than enough: at hundreds of meetings, conferences, and festivals, smart people are put in front of microphones and on panels, and everywhere we hear comparable thoughts about the climate crisis and ways of understanding it. But for Driving the Human, Forecast, as the initiator, was able to bring together very different people and organisations and put them into a concrete working mode. Global warming is something experienceable, physical, and it affects all of our lives very directly. Therefore, we find it useful and even necessary to work with concrete tools, materials and, above all, spaces. We don't want to merely analyse, explain, or describe with words, but to engage all the senses. The prototypes of Driving the Human could actually be experienced through various steps of their development process and especially at the festival. The audience was able to entrust themselves to a multi-layered process of spatial, visual, and sonic experiences, to take things in their hands, to engage in games, meditations, guided tours, conversations, and workshops, to develop their own thoughts and ask questions. This leads into real collaborative work. The seven prototypes have already made some splashes. They will be invited to other festivals such as the Photo Biennial Porto, and this year we will also present the works at the numerous book launches for our publication. I am sure that the particular ways of working, but also the themes of the prototypes will still be carried forward, and they will still help to understand future works, but also incite new perspectives and possibilities for action.

Bio

Freo Majer is the Artistic Director of Forecast, an international mentorship program that transcends disciplines to facilitate artistic practices through individual mentoring, collaborations with scientific and cultural institutions, workshops, and research trips. Majer looks back at a career as an opera director and producer in European theatres and festivals. Driven by his own experience, and recognizing a gap in the type of support available to cultural workers, he founded Forecast in 2015. He initiated the international research program Driving the Human (2020-2023) and its predecessor Housing the Human (2017-2019).

Tevi Allan Mensah (b. 1998) is an architect and a visual artist graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture (Ensa) of Lyon. Tevi develops his own practice in the space between the architectural project and artistic creation, where eclectic mediums cohabit: from furniture to the scale of the territory, from built projects to research projects. He is interested in the imaginaries of displaced and borderlands territories, as well as the possibility of architecture as a collective means of communication. He is currently teaching at the Ensa Lyon in the framework of the master studio "Utopie/Dystopie".

Jonathan Steiger (b. 1997 in Switzerland) is an artist based in Amsterdam. With a wide-ranging approach that includes video, sculpture and writing he works on the topics of landscape, aesthetics and urbanism. In his current projects he traces the collapse of the nature–culture dichotomy within the landscapes of the anthropocene. He holds a BA in Fine Arts from the Zurich University of the Arts and is currently part of the Studio for Immediate Spaces at the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam. He is a 2022-23 fellow of LINA European Architecture Platform.

Studio Inscape was founded by Eileen Stornebrink and Willie Vogel (NL). Trained as architects and urbanists, Studio Inscape aims to translate eco-philosophical theory into practice. Studio Inscape sees architecture as a continuation of and attunement with its environment, with the aim of creating interior landscapes or 'inscapes.' The team works at the crossroad of research and fabrication, exploring spatial strategies, experiences, installations, and architectural projects.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.