Keynote zur Tagung "Aesthetic matters: becoming an artist, a designer and an architect in the age of Bologna."
The most innovative design and artistic practices today are agile and more entrepreneurial, less dependant on conventional patronage structures. Art and design practitioners are more mobile than ever, working all over the world and confronting new issues, such as global urbanism, migration and climate change. The scale of ecological crisis at the time of the Anthropocene made us realize that all modernist ideas of nature as passive backdrop of human experience, as mastered by engineers and scientists from outside, are irrelevant to the understanding of the current challenges of design and artistic practice. As many ecological issues are too intractable and too enmeshed in contradictory interests, architects, designers and artists embark in an active process of manipulating and reworking nature ‘from within.’ In their work designers gain new knowledge and make explicit the connection of humans to a variety of entities with different ontology: rivers, species, particles, materials and forces; they redefine political order by bringing together stars, prions and people. They engage in redesigning, instigating, and composing every single feature of our common experience; they become cosmopolitical practitioners. Therefore, it is now crucial to re-examine the role of design and art education in the light of cosmopolitics. The lecture will argue for the importance to develop a pedagogy that will account for the complex ecology of design practice, will recognize the diversity of the world and see this pluralism as essential, will raise more awareness of the social, collective and heterogeneous nature of artistic production, will cultivate reflexivity and ‘activate thinking’ to detect the problems of the time, will develop rhetoric and pragmatic tools needed to address these problems, will test different ways of assembling the world.
(Vortrag auf Englisch)
Albena Yaneva is Professor of Architectural Theory and director of the Manchester Architecture Research Centre (MARC) at the University of Manchester, (UK). She has been Visiting Professor at Princeton School of Architecture and Parsons. Her research is intrinsically transdisciplinary and crosses the boundaries of science studies, cognitive anthropology, architectural theory and political philosophy. She is the author of several books: The Making of a Building (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), Made by the OMA: An Ethnography of Design (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2009), Mapping Controversies in Architecture (Ashgate 2012) Five Ways to Make Architecture Political. An Introduction to the Politics of Design Practice (forthcoming with Bloomsbury Publishing, London), and editor (with Alejandro Zaera-Polo) of What is Cosmopolitical Design? (Routledge 2015). Her work has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Thai. Yaneva is the recipient of the RIBA President’s award for outstanding university-located research (2010)