Degree Show Tour 2026

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Degree Show Tour "Sustainability in the Arts"

What does sustainability sound like, feel like, or take shape as in the fields of art and design?

The curated tour “Sustainability in the Arts” invites visitors to explore projects from the ZHdK Diploma Exhibition 2026 that engage with ecological, social, cultural, and political questions of sustainability.

Graduating students from various disciplines present their final projects and offer diverse perspectives on sustainable artistic and design practices. The works range from experimental approaches and social reflection to sensory experiences and speculative visions of the future.

The tour creates space for exchange, new perspectives, and encounters at the intersection of art, design, and sustainability.
 

Projects

In advance, seven projects were selected through a call for proposals. The following diploma theses were featured as part of this year's guided tour:

  • Tooling to Regenerate – A Design for Regional Material Resilience in a Flock

    Caja Peters
    MA Industrial Design

    The project explores how regional regeneration can be scaled through tool development. Tools for loosening fibres and shaping felt respond to local material variations and the realities of wool from Alpine sheep flocks. By remapping the sheep fleece, the work challenges the industrial standardisation of nature and the notion of wool as a uniform resource. It proposes a shift in perspective: from viewing materials as isolated resources to understanding matter as an interconnected network of relationships.

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  • Repair Rituals – Textilpflege als nachhaltige Self-Care Praktik

    Miel Schneeberger
    MA Trends & Identity

    Every day, we care for our bodies and the spaces we inhabit. While a warm shower is often experienced as comforting and restorative, washing or repairing clothing is frequently perceived as a tedious chore. Rather than caring for our garments, we tend to replace them. “Repair Rituals” explored how textile care can become a form of self-care. To this end, a series of care tools and objects were developed that transform mending and cleaning into sensory rituals. These objects invite users to rediscover the practice of caring for clothing. They foster a nurturing relationship with our textiles and make sustainability tangible – not as a sacrifice, but as an act of care for people, materials, and the environment.

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  • No Longer

    Yasmina Kupferschmid
    BA Game Design

    The bachelor's thesis project "No Longer" explores the long-term potential of addressing climate change and ecological sustainability through video games. Drawing on insights and strategies from climate communication, the game combines emotional storytelling with fast-paced, strategic, and deliberately absurd gameplay in a physics-based platformer to raise awareness of the looming climate crisis. The protagonist is a super-elastic polar bear who stretches through the melting Arctic, struggling to survive in a rapidly changing environment.

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  • Verwurzelt – Geschichten der Agrarökologischen Transition

    Manon Davies
    BA Knowledge Visualization

    Industrial agriculture is reaching planetary limits. At the same time, a global yet locally rooted movement for sustainable food production is emerging: the agroecological transition. The graphic reportage “Verwurzelt” brings together journalist Samuel Schlaefli’s reports from Kenya and Senegal with insights into initiatives in Switzerland, interwoven with personal anecdotes by the author, Manon Davies.

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  • ein chimäres Duett bis zum Ende der Zeit

    Sulamith Tamborriello
    BA Fine Arts

    "ein chimäres Duett bis zum Ende der Zeit" is a long-term artistic experiment that explores relationships between human and non-human life forms, between individual care and collective responsibility, and between the self and the other. Over the course of a year, a cross-species collaboration unfolds between Sulamith Tamborriello and a culture of slime mould (Physarum polycephalum)—a process of interdependence, symbiosis, and transformation. The project reflects on hierarchies within cross-species artistic practices and questions how agency, care, and collaboration can be negotiated beyond the human.

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  • an/wesenheiten – be/longing

    Julia Dorsch
    MA Transdisciplinary Studies in the Arts

    A continuous series exploring the intimacy between humans and plankton, inspired by scientific practices such as microscopy as well as a personal connection to water and non-human life. It asks how knowledge of plankton’s role in ecological cycles can be translated into an emotional and embodied understanding of mutual dependence, shared breathing, and being held. Through shifts in scale and perspective, human and planktonic bodies move closer to one another and may begin to merge.

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  • Gardening in the Archives

    Alisha Dutt Islam
    MA Transdisciplinary Studies in the Arts

    “Gardening in the Archives” is an artistic research project that examines gardens as heterotopias—spaces in which contradictory histories, identities, and power relations coexist within a limited environment. Using a transdisciplinary methodology inspired by five stages of gardening, the project explores how both archives and gardens can be understood as living spaces for remembering, caring, and reorganizing knowledge.

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