Animalesque City: Radical Visions about Human-Animal Cohabitation

As part of the Visiting School Animalesque City competition, this Roundtable explores the meaning and potential of wildlife in the design and construction of our urban environments.

Humans are mammals, but our anthropocentric perspective has unbalanced our position within the animal kingdom and within the natural world as a whole. Through the Animalesque City competition - A call for short films - we aim to propose new ways of thinking and engineering that can help us establish interspecies collaboration based on mutuality, instead of domination and one-sided exploitation. We believe that this will lead to more equal cities and resilient socio-ecological systems.

Can we build scenarios for symbiosis with the species that inhabit the world and live alongside us? What can we learn from animals by looking at how they use their senses, the ways in which they communicate and work together, the extent to which they follow their instincts, their adjustments and adaptations? And what do we have to offer from our side?

Over the past three years, the Animalesque Visiting School Berlin has been dedicated to knowledge production about the potential of architectural design as a stimulus for biodiversity. The Berlin based Animalesque team exists of architects and designers Jorge Godoy Roman, Ana Zatezalo Schenk, Sjoerd Krijnen and Florentin Steininger. They work collaboratively with designers, ecologists, biologists, philosophers, artists and academics to stimulate transdisciplinary research that responds to the growing complexities of an urban/natural world.

Prominent researchers and practitioners engaging biodiversity concerns such as Erika Mayr, Emanuele Coccia, Charles Coleman, Jan Wurm, Ricardo de Ostos and Raoul Bunschoten have generously taken part in various projects run by Animalesque.

The Animalesque methodology is instrumentalized through workshops, seminars and the design and construction of physical prototypes. Exhibiting and developing work within the context of art festivals and exhibition spaces allows for curating and presenting the discourse to a broad audience in an engaging way. The current online competition is a reflective response to the current pandemic, which exposes our vulnerability and forces us to rethink our actions and position in the natural world.

www.animalesquecity.com

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Emanuele Coccia is an Italian philosopher who teaches at EHESS in Paris, one of the most important schools of contemporary human sciences. Starting from studies on Averroes and Averroism, his research turned to the ontological status of images and their regulatory power, and to the investigation about the nature of living beings. Regarding these issues, he has published numerous books, including Sensible Life, (2011) and Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of mixture (2018).

Erika Mayr operates within the field of human-nature relationships in urban space. Looking for contemporary forms of care in terms of our relationships with nature, she enjoys gardening, working with her hands to touch the soil. She is engaged with the reinterpretation of beekeeping in an urban context which allows for a spiritual connection to be built with the bees and also to develop a contemporary technique of beekeeping. It is all about caring for them - not keeping them as pets but sharing a daily moment with them - not in one’s own garden, but on public or/and unused land, harvesting delicious honey, all hand-made and at a slow pace, of plants that belong to the city and that can be used as „commons“, as well as the distribution of local honey among friends.

Liam Young is a speculative architect and director who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. He is cofounder of Tomorrows Thoughts Today, an urban futures think tank, exploring the local and global implications of new technologies and Unknown Fields, a nomadic research studio that travels on expeditions to chronicle these emerging conditions as they occur on the ground. His worldbuilding for the film and television industries has been acclaimed in both mainstream and architectural media, including the BBC, NBC, Wired, Guardian, Time Magazine and New Scientist, he is a BAFTA nominated producer and his work has been collected by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum and MAAS in Sydney. He has published several books including the recent Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post Anthropocene and has taught internationally at the Architectural Association, Princeton University and now runs the ground breaking Masters in Fiction and Entertainment at Sci Arc in Los Angles. Liam's narrative approach sits between documentary and fiction as he focuses on projects that aim to reveal the invisible connections and systems that make the modern world work. Liam now manages his time between exploring distant landscapes and visualising the future worlds he extrapolates from them.

Ricardo de Ostos creates speculative fictions that envision architectural projects in shifting environmental and cultural contexts. He lives, works and teaches in London at both, the Architectural Association and The Bartlett School of Architecture. He is the co-director of NaJa & deOstos studio and co-author of 'The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad' (Springer Wien/New York, 2006) 'Ambiguous Spaces' (Princeton Press, 2007) and 'Scavengers and Other Creatures in Promised Lands' (AA, 2017).

In her work, artist, architect and researcher Dr.Pinar Yoldas focusses on topics like posthumanism, the anthropocene, neuroscience and feminist technoscience. Already at the age of five, Pinar exhibited her paintings and became the youngest artist with an exhibition in Turkey. Today, she uses architectural installations, kinetic sculptures, sound, video and drawing to create a discourse on ecological ethics. Besides her creative work, Pinar holds five degrees in architecture , visual communications , information technology, new media art and neuroscience. She received a Certificate for Cognitive Neuroscience from Duke University, USA where she wrote her PhD thesis titled “Speculative Biologies: New Directions in Art in the Age of the Anthropocene”.