Field Station Berlin has been operational since 2016 and collaborates with project spaces distributed across the German capital and on Teufelsberg.

Agents : Christophe Barlieb, Lidia Gasperoni, Jose Alcocer, Matthias Böttger, Elisa Limberg, Eva Herr, Sebastian Müllauer, Hauke Helmer, Carsten Fulland, Katharina Barlieb, Bettina Krieg, Isabell Schrickel, Cornelius Meyer, Holger Prang, Matthias Ballestrem, Katharina Beckmann, Thomas Stadler, Philipp Deines, Richard Rabensaat, Lukas Kronawitter, Philipp Reinfeld

Summer School 2016 SENSE ADAPT AND CREATE

VR ON SITE TEUFELSBERG

Agent: Philipp Reinfeld

LECTURES AND EVENTS

Agent: Lidia Gasperoni

LECTURE SERIES in Cooperation with DAZ (Deutsches Architektur Zentrum) We need to talk!

Agents: Lidia Gasperoni, Christophe Barlieb, Matthias Böttger

The Educational Platform is a space of sharing and gathering practices of experimentation as a transformative field radically engaged with architectural pedagogy. This platform should become a shared field of methodological and institutional discourses that cross the boundaries between academia and practice. We take the time to understand and implement educational practices. The educational platform is working as a “collaborative field agent” that senses, adapts, and creates the contemporary tasks of the Anthropocene in education. Architecture as an entangled field has a radical and undeniable impact on the environment. In the context of the Anthropocene, architectural practice is therefore facing multiple challenges. The environment is no longer just the background or context in which architecture emerges, but architecture itself has become part of the forces that create our geological environment. This requires the discipline to radically rethink its techniques and materials as well as its aesthetics and the documentation of its impacts, objects, and qualities. To respond to these challenges, it is crucial to alter our current architectural practices. But it is equally important to reconsider the ways in which education creates knowledge about architecture.

Lectures and workshops

Agents: Lidia Gasperoni, Andrea Rossi, Till Zihlmann, Jennifer Raum

Field Station Ghent aka “Field Station Studio” is situated in Ghent Belgium and is a dependency of KU Leuven’s Sint Lucas School of Architecture. It was founded in 2016 by Corneel Cannaerts and Michiel Helbig: “We need to alter our standard ways of understanding architecture and habitual modes of operation in order for architecture to be relevant in the expanded field. Adopting approaches from other fields of artistic and design practice, media arts, installation, performance, video games and interaction design, might enable us to disrupt disciplinary constraints and extend architectural practices into new domains. We are particularly interested in potential pathways being opened by new models of collaboration, open source, hacking, tinkering… etc. Students are actively encouraged to find their own set of tools media and modes of working, we expect a high quality and personal output”.

Agents: Corneel Cannaerts, Michiel Helbig

Vibeke Jensen and Santiago De Waele are two artists who live and work together as DE JENZ on a small group of islets on the Norwegian west coast since 2021. Nautøyna is the most western Norwegian settlement, with only 11 inhabitants. In this former fishing community, the population is shrinking while tourism is increasing in the region. In the 1980’s Canadian Sitka pines were planted to provide shelter on the stormy islands. The seedlings have since developed into dense forests and the inhabitants talk about how this invasive species blocks the view and disrupts the cultural landscape, without a common understanding of the historical flora or what and who belongs. As newcomers, we are intrigued to explore this situation further.

As part of the ongoing project AKWANAUTØYNA, DE JENZ travelled to the Azores and started Travelers and Mediators that revolves around issues of who and what is native/invasive from different perspectives, both biological and human – over time. While here we are making a prototype of the ‘travellers’ (vertical floating poles) by pairing wood that we find on beaches with wood that grows locally. The travellers will be equipped with QR-codes describing their origin. A weight in the bottom keeps the poles upright while a bamboo flute on top makes them whistle on their journey across the Atlantic Ocean. They travel to new destinations where people can learn about them when and where they arrive. By the end of our stay, we plan to stage a Mediator event connecting people and knowledge that in different ways have contributed to the travellers: like a biologist, reed braider artisan, forestry worker, historian, oceanographer and art curator. On the seaside of São Miguel we will construct a situation where we share our knowledge and ideas before launching the travellers into the ocean. After establishing the Azores prototype, we will bring the project back home to extend it by multiplying the Travellers and Mediators through working with schools and local island communities around the world.

Vibeke has lived and practiced as an artist in New York and Berlin for decades, and is also a visiting professor at Bergen School of Architecture since 2010. Santiago is from Belgium where he has built public artworks as technical director and co-curator of the Bruges Triennial for contemporary art and architecture from 2014-2021, and before that for three iterations of the Beaufort triennial sculpture project along the Belgian coast.

Agents: Vibeke Jensen, Santiago De Waele

Organisms Democracy is a political system that attributes power to all living beings who inhabit/use a state territory. All living beings are citizens, with the same rights and the same right to political participation. Since humans are a rather recent part of a continuously shared population of Planet Earth for more than three billion years, it is now time to share political power with our fellow living beings. Maybe this is a way to arrive at a sustainable form of caretaking for our critical sphere of living. Organisms Democracy proposes a political field experiment of an inclusive democracy of all organisms. Since the first Organisms Democracy was founded in 2018 in Vienna by the artists group Club Real, the project strives in participatory ways to create alternative forms of government. Organisms Democracy Berlin Osloer Str. was founded in 2019 and has since implemented regular sessions of Organisms Parliaments, in which human representatives decide on behalf of all species about the future of the state territory. Organisms Parliament also appoints the Garden Executive to carry out their decisions. In regular sessions of the Constitutional Organisms Court these decisions are reviewed and, if necessary, revoked. The founding documents of the current system are the Universal Declaration of Organisms Rights and the Constitution (2017) of Organisms Democracy Berlin Osloer Str. (2019).

Agent: CLUB REAL

Field Station Basel took place at the beginning of April 2018 at the FHNW’s HyperWerk (Institute for Postindustrial Design) coordinated by Prof. Matthias Böttger.

Agent : Matthias Böttger

Field Station Sicily is an ongoing project initiated by artist Gabriela Volanti in the village of Petralia Sottana in the Palermo region of Sicily.

Sicily Madonie PS Petralia Sottana consists of and acts in two circles:

The inner circle is the private one.
The own location – her research regarding the building structures, which are understood as resources.
The house in Via Rosa / Via Neve as the starting point from the inside to the outside.
The private structures of the residents, which are part of the existing resources / potentials.

The outer circle is the public one.
The engagement with the Anthropocene to find perspectives for the development of new living and working spaces. The dialogue with the local people.
The public buildings, partly unused, example: sports hall project.
Two examples of architectural challenges that Volanti is dealing with on site:
The oldest part of the village, below the piazza with the Chiesa Madre. The old stone houses stand on rocks, some of them are nested dwellings that can only be reached by pedestrians. This is where the emigration of the village began. Picking up on this residential structure, it can be conceived as a future, contemporary way of living.
The architectural structures carry potentials that, thanks to perception and creativity, can lead to new ways of thinking in order to let architecture emerge anew from existing structures.
In order to perceive this as a possibility, it is necessary to evaluate the site and its surroundings in their current state. By linking the existing potentials with new forms of life, a place can be architecturally “reworked”.

Agent : Gabriela Volanti

FS Rahmen.Space is an ongoing project initiated by Isabell Schrickel and others navigating the Berlin and Brandenburg waterways with their DIY solar-powered boat/greenhouse.

Agents: Isabell Schrikel and Philipp von Hilgers

Field Station Vielitz : Re:fugium V40 is an ongoing project initiated by artist Bettina Krieg addressing art, body and soul. It is located in the German State of Brandenburg.