The discursive platform “Design after the Anthropocene” at the Berlin Museum of Decorative Arts explores the concept of “More Than Human” through lectures, panels and workshops. The experimental design exhibition “Imagine: Coral Reef. Regenerative Design” is also part of the programme.
In late March, the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin launched a discursive platform where pop-up exhibitions, lectures, workshops and discussion panels will take place on an ongoing basis. The aim of the project is to explore the concept of “More Than Human” from the perspective of the design disciplines, in particular design, which are being scrutinised against the backdrop of the current climate crisis and increasing shortage of resources. “More Than Human” encompasses a spectrum of transdisciplinary theories and approaches in which, as it says, “conventional anthropocentric perspectives are questioned and a paradigm shift towards a more intensive networking between humans and the environment is called for”. The project builds on the term “Natureculture” introduced by Donna Haraway, which is intended to point out how closely human and non-human species are intertwined on our planet. The blurring of boundaries between nature and culture requires “new ways of thinking about power and agency, difference and communality, atmospheres and epistemology”. Numerous questions need to be answered: What does “more than human” mean for a design concept or for a design philosophy that primarily focuses on people and their needs? What does design mean beyond the still valid modernist vision of progress? What alternatives are opening up to a production practice that has so far focussed on the exploitation of life forms and resources? What can a holistic design process look like that takes into account the integration of non-human life forms and ecosystems?
The project, curated by Claudia Banz, is designed as a process that develops in exchange and collaboration with international actors from transdisciplinary contexts and will materialise in various formats at the Kunstgewerbemuseum until 2025.On this occasion, from 3 May to 23 June, the Berlin Museum of Decorative Arts will host the special exhibition “Imagine: Coral Reef. Regenerative Design”, a collaboration between EOOS and the Institute of Design Research Vienna. The exhibition focuses on “the search for a new orientation for design in a world characterised by numerous crises”. The complex ecosystems of corals, these “rainforests of the seas”, which are home to a fascinating diversity of species and are under increasing pressure from man-made climate change, threatening to disappear in the near future, serve as a metaphor. Parallel to other pop-up exhibitions, the Kunstgewerbemuseum’s collection, which is also based on an anthropocentric perspective, will be re-examined in the context of the “More Than Human” discourse in a “speculative cabinet of curiosities”.
