Organizers : Alex Roemer, Adrian Schefer
Guest experts : Polly and Tonja from Klasse Klima
Date: 29/10/22
Time: 12.00 – 13.30 CET
Location: Germany, online

Coming together across national borders, networking and developing projects is not always the most climate-friendly way of collaboration – an international exchange is nevertheless an important thing in order to make joint decisions for the purpose of climate activation in the future.

In the workshop Climate Activating we deal with this tension and with further questions on the topic of sustainability within Constructlab projects, for example:

• Do we always need to travel to gather and make projects with an international group?
• How do we ensure continuation and constant commitment of the projects, i.e. how do we create an inherent sustainability of them?
•What happens with all the used material when the show is over?

This is the continuation of a conversation we started earlier this year with Katharina Richter and her team of Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken. Following her invitation to work collaboratively on “a place of critical confidence”, we created the exhibition “Table of Content”. It is part of the Stadtgalerie’s approach to establish a format of a “climate activating” practise through sustainable transformation within the cultural sector.
In other projects we have already reflected upon these concerns in various ways. At The Arch, Genk 2017 we used self-recycled plastic bricks that consisted of two components to create a memorial of our communal work. The beautiful project Casa do Vapor was built out of wood from the construir juntos project in Guimarães ECC 2012. At Kunststadt citta del arte Kunsthaus Graz 2012 we successfully managed to reuse the exhibition design – at Arte Util 2013 that approach unfortunately did not work out. The former material of the Künstlerforum Worpswede is supposed to become the Baupalast. Stored at Dragonerareal, time will tell whether we will manage to actually make that happen.

The findings and experiences from those past and future Contructlab projects will be the base for discussion, learning and scheming of our workshop day. Taking place online, it was developed in cooperation with our friends from klasseklima.org. Founded in 2019 at the Berlin University of the Arts, the initiative aims to establish the urgency of the climate crisis in creative education. Starting out by organizing a student-led transdisciplinary seminar series, still running every week, Klasse Klima further engages in events and debates on the intersection of art, design and ecology.

We invite you to share the insights that we overlooked, mirror the findings with your experiences and amplify what is discovered so far. Please register here.

Climate Activating is part of the Workshop series that flanks the digital symposium On the network and the launch of the new digital networking platform and is supported by the Fond Soziokultur with funds from the Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien within the framework of NEUSTART KULTUR.