Events

Please join us for the relaunch of the Ocean Space website, which presents the work of students on several master courses at BAS dealing with the Ocean Space.

Decades ago, in her well known Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!, Proposal for an exhibition ‘Care’, Mierle Lademan Ukeles asked "After the revolution, who's going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?", a question that clearly emphasises the need of caring for the spaces we inhabit—not only to care for its inhabitants, humans and more than humans, but for all the materiality that form our cities and environments. Challenging what history indeed told us, this presentation delves through a set of examples, on former and existent practices of care and material kindships, it intends to be a journey through places, scales, and ways of understanding human and non-human relationships with different kinds of matter.

This lecture departs from the acknowledgement that practices of care transverse different scales―from the planet, to the territory, to the city, the community and to the body. When we think about 'ecologies' it is often forgotten our own materiality as creatures made of “stuff." Iron in the blood, in a rock or in a structural beam, we share —but not always see— the patterns of our traces in the world. We are all participants in the rhythms of our planet, and delving in the ways in which we reconfigure what is outside of us but not completely alien to us, might be a first step of rethinking human and more-than-human kinships and with that, contribute to the care ecologies of this small troubled planet—que pese a todo, es inmensamente bello.

Image: ‘Underground life,’ Guillermo López, 2016.

Ethel Baraona Pohl (they/them) is a critic, writer and curator, as well as a co-founder of the independent research studio and publishing house dpr-barcelona, which operates in the fields of architecture, political theory, and the social milieu. Their curatorial practice includes, among others, “Twelve Cautionary Urban Tales” (Matadero Madrid, 2020–21); and more recently, “Llibres Model” a curated book collection and open library (Model, Barcelona Architectures Festival 2022, 2023). Ethel is Senior Researcher at the Chair of Architecture and Care (Care.) in the Department of Architecture ETH Zürich. Their writing has been widely published, both in academic and independent publications. Ethel believes that publishing is a political act, and reading, a form of resistance.

The lecture is organised by Mater Studio: Spatial Practices of Care (Rosario Talevi, Kandis Friesen, Anders Rubing) at the Bergen School of Architecture (BAS). The lecture will also be the first of the lectures series “ways of teaching-with” which will unfold over the spring semester.

This lecture is aimed at the diploma students, but is open to all interested.

Inger Måren BIO: I hold a PhD in Plant Ecology from the Department of Biology, University of Bergen (2009). I currently work at the Department of Biological Sciences and in 2017 I was appointed UNESCO Chair on Sustainable Heritage and Environmental Management – Nature and Culture.

My research focuses on the dynamics in coupled human and natural systems, including sustainable development, natural resource management, agro-biodiversity, sustainable land use, ecosystem services, agroecology, and food security. I work with colleagues across the social and natural sciences to elucidate links between anthropogenic activities and the environment, in Europe, as well as in Asia, North-America and Africa. I seek to gain multifaceted knowledge within ecology and associated disciplines to investigate social-ecological complexities. In addition to a PhD in ecology I have completed a minor in Social Anthropology, and the cross-disciplinary courses Ecology and Development and Resource Management and Environmental Conservation.

Images: Inger Måren