2020-12, Büsse, Michaela

The article proposes an empirical and discursive understanding of design as engaging and intensifying uneven power relations. By affiliating with the ontological turn in anthropology, such re-defined reading of design acknowledges design's complicity with extractive capitalism while aiming to open up possibilities to think design otherwise. In recent years, inspired by the resurgence of materialism, abstract notions of design as mediating practice between human and environment have gained popularity. Yet, these more-than-human-centred design theories tend to obscure the material and immaterial infrastructures that still shape human and nonhuman realities. By utilising the example of sand's transformation into land and tracing its journey across sites, actors and continents, the infrastructures of planetary transformation – as well as what eludes them – are investigated. Turning matter into medium emphasises thresholds and ruptures in the human-material relationship and thus transcends both a socially constructed and material reading of reality. Through a historical and empirical relocation of the current more-than-human-centred design discourse, the research presented in this article aims to support the establishment of a critical anthropology of design.

2020, Pilav, Armina, Bedir, Merve, Allen, Jamie, Büsse, Michaela

“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” —Walter Benjamin  The island nation of Matla, as any statutorily political and physically real place, exists in the relations and transformations of documents and monuments. It is a reality of written inscriptions and physical places, in resonance. National and physical infrastructures require traceable regulations, policies, agreements and decisions—reams of documents that originate, validate and catalogue terrains, construction and operation. Policy, agreements, letters of agreement and legislation serve to instantiate and defend physical cultural sovereignties and borderlands, these also becoming historical monuments changes wrought to lands and peoples. Legal and governmental procedures and decrees, abstracted and composed at distance from their sites of application, materially change how and where material goods human and non-human bodies are able to move. Islands are bodies in the making, worlds of flows, connections and liquidities. The Maltese archipelago is geopolitical and geophysical infrastructure, a place where security, value and identity are wrought through transport, transfer and movement. The documents and monuments that regulate this process are the subject of this workshop, noting that it is amongst the central tenets of capital flow in our contemporary age that materials — raw, commodity, consumable — are much more “free” than are people. If we characterise freedom in part through the ability to move around, it is apparent that “free trade” means it is easier for a Walmart T-shirt sewn in Asia to move across borders than it is for the human labourers who made it to do the same. This is all explicitly enabled by real infrastructures like the Belt and Road Initiative, a global development philosophy and infrastructure project being undertaken by the Chinese government, which involves development investments in 152 countries. The relation of documents and monuments that allows for migrations of materials and peoples will be explored in this workshop. We will trace the migratory effects of specific documents (historical and contemporary policies, agreements, contracts, and laybills) on linked sites, industrial and infrastructural objects and installations, regions and landscapes) as resulting in and stemming from monuments (specific sites, industrial and infrastructural objects and installations, regions and landscapes). Maltese archipelago, and its relation to globalising initiatives like the Belt and Road, will attempt a bureaucratic forensics using data, field visits, and investigative tracing, visualization and storytelling.

2019-05-23, Caviezel, Flavia, Gisler, Priska, Ritter, Christian, Büsse, Michaela

A workshop conceptualized and organised of the SARN Board members Flavia Caviezel, Priska Gisler and Christian Ritter, in collaboration with Michaela Büsse, all members of the SARN working group 'Methods & Practices'. The research initiative DACAR – Doing Arth-Goldau–Como as artistic research serves as an agent and means to explore various ways “to do methods". It is dedicated to north-south/south-north mobility between the metropolitan regions of Zürich and Como/Milan. The focus lies on movements of people, material and immaterial goods. In its frame, explorative approaches and formats are tested. To approach the topic two workshops were conducted in 2019, including the Workshop Hospental/Andermatt . This workshop focused on raw material businesses/gravel pits, art on the periphery and tourism in the Gotthard region, in the Andermatt-Hospen Valley. During the field research we engaged in discussions with protagonists from the region in the following activities: *Haus für Kunst Altdorf: talk and exhibition tour with the director/curator Barbara Zürcher *Talk and tour at the slag landfill Attinghausen with the managing director Edi Schilter *Visit at the gravel and concrete landfill in Zumdorf *Visit at the open community meeting Andermatt *Visit at the Design Hotel Chedi Andermatt At both workshops, field work was carried out as observation; intense exchange amongst the participants of the workshop; meetings with key actors in the field; talking to residents of and people working in the area; observing local businesses; walking as a method of perception; writing field notes; taking pictures, recording audio & video material; and an essayistic field report in the aftermath of the workshop.