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Cultural Studies & Performing Arts, Creative Arts and Design

Crafting Beyond Utopia: Bio-Materials and Poetic Futures

When:

23 June - 27 June 2025

School:

Berlin Summer University of the Arts

Institution:

Berlin University of the Arts

City:

Berlin

Country:

Germany

Language:

English

Credits:

1 EC

Fee:

580 EUR

Interested?
Crafting Beyond Utopia: Bio-Materials and Poetic Futures

About

This course combines hands-on work with bio-materials like bio-plastics, and theoretical discussions on repair, healing and imagination. Participants engage in hands-on projects, challenge Western ideals and create "poetic futures" that celebrate transformative practices and aesthetics beyond perfection. In a week-long process, participants engage with the ambivalences and speculative potentials of repair, healing and related practices such as curing, conjuring, mending, tweaking, bricolage, working around etc. Learning about bio plastics and speculative design methods plays a special role in that process as well as creative writing methods to move towards “poetic futures”. Poetic Futures give value to phenomena and creative spaces beyond reproduction and productivism, such as dreams, the unseen, the unquantifiable, and radical interdependence.

Course leader

Dr. Annika Haas

Target group

artists of all diciplines, age: 18+

Course aim

Participants will work in groups and on individual projects over the course of five days. Participants will read and discuss together, learn how to produce their own bioplastic and are introduced to a set of speculative design methods as well as the local Berlin art scene. Practical skills, theoretical knowledge and abilities to develop authorship are leveraged. Readings and inputs go hand in hand with a speculative design process that supports participants in developing and realizing an individual project, project sketch or prototype in a medium of their choice. Exercises include creative writing, prototyping and conceptual sketching. A special role plays the production of bioplastics with easily available materials in order to practically explore healing and repair beyond the reproductive paradigm.

Fee info

Fee

580 EUR

Interested?

When:

23 June - 27 June 2025

School:

Berlin Summer University of the Arts

Institution:

Berlin University of the Arts

Language:

English

Credits:

1 EC

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