Degree Show Tour 2025

[Translate to English:] Dekoratives Bild
[Translate to English:] Foto: ZHdK

Degree Show Tour "Sustainability in the Arts"

What does sustainability mean — conceived artistically, critically questioned, sensually experienced?

As part of the ZHdK Diploma Exhibition 2025, re-source | Sustainability in the Arts hosted a tour on 16 June 2025, presenting projects in which students engaged creatively, speculatively, and experimentally with the ecological, social, and political challenges of our time.

The works on display opened up new perspectives. They reflected, provoked, and told stories differently — poetically, provocatively, courageously. They demonstrated how art and design can contribute to thinking, feeling, and shaping a sustainable future.

We appreciate the interest and positive feedback, and thank all who attended.

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Decorative Image
Decorative Image
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Projects

In advance of the event, eight projects were selected through a Call for Participation. The following graduation projects were part of this year’s tour:

  • Printed Plants Catalog

    Nicolas Wagner
    BA Visual Communication

    Conventional printing inks are largely made from fossil resources. Printed Plants is a catalogue of screen-printed plant-based pigments. At its core, the project explores the cultivation, production, and use of locally grown, biodegradable inks as a solution for sustainable visual communication. The publication includes colour samples, process images, and information about each plant. All components of the catalogue are biodegradable, and most of the plant-based inks were grown, harvested, and produced by hand.

  • Doomscrolling

    Antoine Félix Bürcher
    MA Fine Arts

    My work is an archaeology of the future. I collect used glass at home and in the city and fuse it into molds—temporalities and memories blend together, evoking a form of natural architecture, like strata of rock that bear witness to the passage of time beyond the human scale. The work is a study of fictional worlds and a reflection on time, in which the design of our present reality—as well as its sustainability and transience—inevitably takes center stage. The sculptures, dated into the future between 2050 and 2100, reflect a generation wondering how to imagine the future and what will remain.

  • Big John

    Smilla Diener
    MA Cultural Critique

    How can we tell that we’re living in the Anthropocene? In her master’s project Big John, Smilla Diener goes in search of traces in stone—and uncovers the story of Hermann Ernst, who, as the world’s leading tunnel boring machine engineer, spent his life reshaping the surface of the Earth. Big John moves between documentary, fictionalized, and fictional passages, weaving a narrative about the fastest century in Earth’s history. It raises questions about our time: Who are the builders of the Great Acceleration? Where do the vast amounts of material we use come from—and where are they going?

  • Schmelzpunkt – Monument eines fortschreitenden Abschieds

    Nuriel Delmée
    BA Trends & Identity

    In Switzerland, 900 glaciers have already disappeared. With their loss, not only the landscape changes, but also our relationship to them. Schmelzpunkt is a tribute—a memory dossier in the form of a magazine: somewhere between documentation, climate critique, and solastalgia. Silent witnesses of loss accompany the publication: glass monuments symbolizing the transience of ice. They were placed in locations where disappearance has occurred. The magazine was carried to a mountain hut—back to the origin, as a lasting farewell.

  • Soma

    Luca Busby, Basil Egger
    BA Interaction Design

    This globally unique installation enables direct communication with lab-grown living neural cells—so-called brain organoids. By touching an artificial membrane, you generate impulses in the organoid, whose responses return as movements in the same membrane. By making this emerging field more transparent, the project invites reflection on a sustainable and organic future, where biological material is proposed as a solution for modern computing technology.

  • locally sourced

    Vera Steinmann
    BA Fine Arts

    www.locallysourced.ch is a consulting platform I run for artists who want to engage with climate awareness in their artistic production. In the consultations, I aim to work with artists to reduce CO2 emissions in their practice without altering the core intent of their work. The website also features a collection of materials produced locally or in neighboring countries, a list of sources for second-hand materials, a CO2 calculator for art projects, and a directory of open workshops.

  • buen vivir – ñutse canseye

    Zoé Nathalie Kugler
    BA Film

    Short documentary, 16.5 minutes. Synopsis: Entire soils and waters of a natural paradise are being contaminated by oil extraction in the Amazon region. It’s a slow process that threatens the health and traditional culture of the local communities. Thirteen women raise their voices against the destruction of their homeland. Through protests and silent resistance, they confront a complex and opaque global power structure.

  • Hard Boiled Wonderland

    Manning Dong
    MA Dance Choreography

    When the dancer is placed within the power dynamics and social structures simulated by materials such as seesaws, tyres, planks, and silks, the body becomes a being that is held, oppressed, and mobilised by these structures. Can we re-understand and transform the social systems we live in through bodily experience? The relationship between the dancers and the materials shifts from singular control to mutual support—between the collapse and reorganisation of the structure—where human nature becomes a possible path to social sustainability, supported by a sense of co-presence.