Funding Program 2025

Visual

The Sustainability Dossier promotes disciplinary and interdisciplinary projects by lecturers and researchers in the field of sustainability. The supported projects highlight the relevance of the arts, design, and education within the context of sustainability – in practice, in theory, and in current debates – and are characterised by an innovative, forward-looking approach. Members of ZHdK are supported in testing their knowledge and skills through applied projects, contributing to the sustainable transformation of our society and environment.

The Sustainability Dossier supported following projects during the funding program 2025:

  • Wallmapu ex situ: Revisited / Reworked / Repositioned

    Aldir Polymeris, Nina Willimann, DKV

    "Wallmapu ex situ: Revisited / Reworked / Repositioned" is an artistic research project that engages with the archive of the performance project Wallmapu ex situ. It builds on an ongoing exploration, begun in 2013, of the Indigenous territory of Wallmapu in southern Chile and its historical entanglements with Switzerland. The project transcribes, reviews, and analyzes an extensive audio and video archive, and uses artificial intelligence to investigate questions of translation, mediality, and archival practice.

    Project website

  • Climate Content Day

    Caroline Feder, DDE

    At the first "Climate Content Day", we explored how entertainment media can be used to communicate complex climate issues in an accessible way and thereby increase their visibility. The aim was to reconcile the perceived incompatibility between sustainability and entertainment. Creators, producers, media organizations, and agencies shared insights from their best-case projects, while researchers presented valuable findings from current studies. Together, they exchanged knowledge, discussed challenges, and explored new approaches to forward-looking narratives.

    Project website

  • Blumenfeld am Fluss

    Anna Albisetti, Smilla Jost, Anna Isler, Markus Haeflinger, Piero Good, DKV

    "Blumenfeld am Fluss" is an artistic and participatory project that has been taking place since 2023 in a community garden along the Limmat. Through open gardening sessions and workshop formats, the project brings together people with refugee experience – particularly residents of the Federal Asylum Centre (BAZ) – and local neighborhood residents. Its aim is to foster exchange, participation, and a sense of belonging through collective gardening, artistic processes, and informal encounters.

    Project website

  • HANDS ON – Selbstwirksamkeit im Konsumchaos

    Henriette-Friederike Herm, Corinna Mattner (External), DDE

    Young people are theoretically aware of sustainability, but often struggle to translate this knowledge into concrete action – the classic attitude-behavior gap. We believe that hands-on self-efficacy is key to overcoming this gap. Those who create with their own hands undergo a fundamental shift in values – from consumption to creation, from status defined by brands to status grounded in personal identity. However, before we could develop workshops capable of achieving this, we first needed to understand how young people aged 12 to 16 actually live, consume, and think. To this end, we developed "Play Probes": playful, ethnographic tools that provide authentic insights into their everyday lives.

    Project website

  • ZZZ – Zirkulärer Zukunftsraum Züri

    Helena Klein, Lisa Ochsenbein, Tom Stäubli, DDE

    Exchange points are places of giving and receiving – of objects and stories – and become spaces of conscious circulation, where items gain new meaning instead of ending up as waste. The continued development of student projects from the Minor in Sustainable Design 2024/25 at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), created in cooperation with the City of Zurich, presents two approaches to sustainable design. "Kallaxus" develops a digital exchange shelf that facilitates the dropping off and picking up of items, implemented in collaboration with the association "WOP". The photo series "Exchange Stories" portrays actors in the circular economy at the mobile exchange unit and is exhibited at the "Josy" circular center.