Sustainable Living

Ãœber Lebenskunst. Initiative for Culture and Sustainability

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The “Ãœber Lebenskunst” project is turning the city of Berlin into a showcase for initiatives that bring together culture and sustainability and examine new models for action.

Whether neighborhood gardens, urban beekeepers, carrot mobs, Wiki woods, sewing cafés or climate pirates on the Berlin’s Spree River – around the world, new forms of ecologically sustainable living models are being put to the test.
The Call for Future is directed at everyone who wants to come up with ideas both in and for Berlin. We are looking for art projects and social initiatives conceived to go beyond what we think is possible. That make the impossible a reality. The art of sustainable living in the 21st century needs not only global expertise, it needs the dedication and the innovative spirit of local initiatives.

Application deadine: May 24, 2010

“Everyone’s a part” – the trailer for the Call for Future.

See the movie in large scale

HOW TO BECOME AN ARTIST FOR SUSTAINABLE LIVING

It’s easy. Please fill out our form (making sure it’s legible) and submit it in either German or English by May 24, 2010.

Please download the form here:

Deutsch | English | Français | Srpski/Hrvatski/Bosanski |  Polski | Español | Türkçe | Tiêng Viêt

In a two-phase selection process, applicants who are selected in the initial round will be asked to submit supplementary material (business plan, information about relevant previous projects, project planning, etc.) at the beginning of June 2010. An international jury made up of representatives from the realms of art, culture, media, politics, science and civil society will confer on which projects should receive funding by the the end of June 2010. The successful participants will be invited to present their projects at a kick-off workshop September 7-9 at the House of World Cultures in Berlin. The chosen projects will be given conceptual and financial support up through the theme festival to be held in June 2011.

How to submit your application
The application deadline is May 24, 2010 (postmark date/date of e-mail)
# by e-mail to call@ueber-lebenskunst.org
# by mail to

House of World Cultures
The “Ãœber Lebenskunst” project
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10
10557 Berlin

… or submit your application in person at the reception.

The House of World Cultures at

Google Maps

If you have questions about the Call for Future, you can contact the Ãœber Lebenskunst team.

Just send an e-mail to Info@ueber-lebenskunst.org or call us:

Mon-Fri from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.

Tel. 030 397 872-20
FAQ

Frequently asked questions about the Call For Future

Application

1. Who can apply?
Anyone can apply. Individuals, groups, families, residential communities, citizens’ initiatives, associations or organizations from the realms of art, culture, media, architecture and urban development, science and research. Applicants who are NOT residents of Berlin have to work together with a local partner. Because the idea is to focus on model artistic projects and social initiatives that build on models from elsewhere both in and for Berlin, we are expressly seeking these types of partnerships.

2. Which application documents have to be submitted?
For the pre-selection process, it is sufficient to submit the form (in German or English) which you have personally filled out and signed. Supplementary materials such as drawing, photos, manuscripts, recordings, audio files or DVDs can also be submitted. These materials will not be sent back. They will remain in the House of World Cultures.

3. How are projects selected?
As part of a two-phase selection process, a pre-selection will be made on the basis of the application documents submitted. The preselected applicants will be informed in writing at the beginning of June and asked to submit additional information about the planned project (résumé, business plan, information about previous projects, etc.). The Über Lebenskunst jury will confer on project funding at the end of June 2010.

4. What kind of funding can I expect?
In addition to financial funding of up to €20,000 per project, initiatives may receive both technical and/or conception all advice for project implementation from the Über Lebenskunst team. The participants selected by the jury will present their concepts at an (internal) kick-off workshop to be held September 7-9, 2010.
All participants that make the second round will be invited to a dinner the day before the kick-off workshop. The focus here will be getting to know each other in person and networking among the relevant actors in Berlin.

5. Can third-party resources be incorporated into the project?
Co-funding is possible.

6. Why is the call limited to Berlin?
In the 21st century, local ideas always have to be applied globally. Which is why we are primarily directing our call to local initiatives or to people who will implement their ideas and projects together with partners in Berlin, focusing (implicitly or explicitly) on global issues.
In addition, the future of humanity lies in the urban realm. Already today, more people live in urban regions than in rural regions around the world. Global urban co-existence must be conceptualized in a way that gives new value to living and is continuously reinvented. Today, people from roughly 190 different countries live together in Berlin. This is just one more reason that Berlin is a model city for ecologically sustainable living models for the 21st century.

via Ãœber Lebenskunst. Initiative for Culture and Sustainability.

A High Desert Test Sites Lecture & Workshop Series

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Saturday May 1st-Sunday May 2nd 2010

2-Day Workshop in Joshua Tree, 12 students, $120 fee

The New Everyday Live is an endeavor designed to both stimulate conversation and catalyze action by considering overlap between contemporary art and craft, sustainable living, survival skills, ecology and earth science, and cultural variation. Each participant in The New Everyday Life will leave with a new set of skills and inspirations, after intimately experiencing the Mojave desert’s unique context for life and living.

Only a few spots left as of 4/21. Email info.hdts@gmail.com

For more information go to: http://www.highdeserttestsites.com

Go to EcoLOGIC LA

Sustainability and Contemporary Art Symposium Budapest

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Sustainability and Contemporary Art: Hard Realities and the New Materiality
Central European University Budapest
2-6pm 26 March 2009

Janek Simon, Niszczarka

Janek Simon, Niszczarka

Since the last symposium on Sustainability and Contemporary Art held at CEU in February 2008, which took as its subject the Operaist dilemma of ‘Exit or Activism?’ and examined Paulo Virno’s idea of ‘exit’ as the ultimate form of resistance, the world has witnessed an intensifying fight for resources under the Arctic, the rocketing of food and oil prices, the Russian gas crisis, and the systemic failure of international financial institutions. These ‘hard realities’ have caused a switch from concerns of immaterial labour to recognition of the ‘new materiality’ of current circumstances.

This recent turn has been addressed by theorist Slavoj Žižek, who notes that while in the last decades it was ‘trendy to talk about the dominant role of intellectual labour in our post-industrial societies, today materiality appears in an almost vengeful way in all its aspects, from a future struggle for ever-diminishing resources (food, water, energy, minerals) to the degradation of the environment.’ The 2009 edition of Sustainability and Contemporary Art therefore brings together artists, theorists and environmental activists to investigate the implications of ‘hard realities’ and ‘new materiality’ for political action, artistic theory and practice, and sustainable living in the 21st century.

SPEAKERS

Marina Grzinić, Sustainability and Capital

Marina Grzinić is a philosopher, artist and theoretician. She is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Institute of Fine Arts, Post Conceptual Art Practices and a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy in Ljubljana. She is a founder of Reartikulacija (Ljubljana) and recently published the book Re-Politicizing art, Theory, Representation and New Media Technology.

Tamás St.Auby, The Subsistence Level Standard Project 1984 W.

Tamás St.Auby was born in 1944 and lives in Budapest. In 1968 he founded IPUT (International Parallel Union of Telecommunications). He was censored for his artistic radicalism, promotion of art strikes and questioning of ideology and forced to leave Hungary in the mid-1970s. Since returning from Geneva in 1991, St.Auby has lectured at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts.

Tadzio Müller, It’s economic growth, stupid! On climate change, mad-eyed moderates and realistic radicals

Tadzio Müller lives in Berlin, where he is active, after many years of being a counterglobalist summit-groupie, in the emerging climate action movement. Having escaped the clutches of (academic) wage labour, he is currently writing a report about ‘green capitalism’ for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, and otherwise doing odd translation jobs. He is also an editor of Turbulence – Ideas for Movement

www.turbulence.org.uk

Janek Simon, How to Make a Digital Handwatch at Home

Janek Simon was born in 1977. Studied sociology and psychology at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. His artistic activity began around 2001. He is author of interactive installations, videos, objects. Simon takes inspiration from computer games, Internet and the archive (in its multiple meanings).

Sebastjan Leban, Silent Weapon of Extermination

Sebastjan Leban is an artist and theoretician from Ljubljana. His artistic practice involves the collaboration with Stas Kleindienst, the group Trie and the group Reartikulacija. He is one of the editors of the journal Reartikulacija and has exhibited in numerous national and international exhibitions, participated in many symposiums and lectures and published texts in several different publications.

Alina Asavei, A Sustainable Aesthetics: Contextual and Ethical Beauty

Alina Asavei is from Romania and currently she is a PhD candidate in Aesthetics (Department of Philosophy, Central European University, Budapest). She works principally in the areas of social philosophy, cultural studies, art and disability, the politics of aesthetics, forms of artistic engagement during and after totalitarian regimes. She published articles in the domain of Art History, Aesthetics and Social and Cultural History.

Alan Watt, Sustainability in the Face of Hard Reality

Alan Watt is a lecturer in environmental philosophy and the development of environmental thought at the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at Central European University.

Maja and Reuben Fowkes The Environmental Impact of Contemporary Art

Maja and Reuben Fowkes are curators and art historians who deal with issues of memory, ecology and translocal exchange.  They have curated and written extensively on the issue of contemporary art and sustainability.

http:// www.translocal.org

The programme of the Symposium on Sustainability and Contemporary Art is devised by Maja and Reuben Fowkes (Translocal.org) and co-organised with the Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy and the Centre for Arts and Culture at Central European University.

For further information and booking details please see the project website:

www.translocal.org/sustainability

Video Games + Sustainability

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Video games exist for improving brain fitness, financial planning, and learning dance routines, so why not for sustainable living? The field of video games that teach sustainability strategies appears to be slowly blossoming.

  • PowerUp the Game by IBM teaches kids how to save the world by bring clean energy to communities.
  • CO2FX is a web based multi-user educational game which explores the relationship of global warming to economic, political and science policy decisions.
  • Majesco Entertainment’s “Eco-Creatures: Save the Forest” promote awareness of the perils of “…over-industrialization, deforestation, pollution, extinction and global warming.”

Post your favorite environmental video game below.

Go to Eco-Catalysts

Mandalas

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The phrase “Earth Peace Mandala” sounds awfully alterna-hippie. Brings to mind sage, and barefoot dreadlocked dancing, and the sounds of, say, Phish, or the Dead. Which sometimes is great for the worms, and sometimes is great for jokes.

Artist Veronica Ramirez created Earth Peace Mandalas along the route of the Sustainable Living Roadshow. She does indeed bless the circle first with sage, but she does not dance around barefoot, and she’s not necessarily a Phish fan. What she does create is a gathering space, a place for people to connect with something slow and beautiful, and she does it with foliage and flower cuttings she finds in each city.

There’s much about a big ol’ flower soil mandala that’s not designed for transport: at every city a series of about 12 boxes, tubs and bags were unloaded: pinecones, pebbles, corn and a heart-shaped rock make up the basic elements of each mandala. In contrast, most other gear can be characterized bu the EZ-up: designed to be lightweight, transportable, quick to set up and break down. When asked about her gear, Veronica simply says, “It’s a process.”

Which is the essence of mandala-making: the process. Traditional Buddhist mandalas are created with colored sand, following intricate lined patterns marked out on a level surface. The act of manipulating tiny grains of sand into endless and repeating forms is a kind of mediation in and of itself.The lines in such mandalas depict the four directions, significant gods, portions of legends, and symbolic colors.

Ramirez just uses sticks and petals. As she works, folks stop by, tuning out the music and surrounding carnival to help her pluck petals, strip branches, sift grains and spread them into a circular devotion of the planet. It gives a moment to pause and reflect, and to wonder for a moment at natural processes.

 

 

Go to the Green Museum

On Monbiot, Agas, and sustainable middle-class living

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Atlantic Books might possibly be regretting using an Aga as the cover image for Andrew Price’s book Slow-Tech: Manifesto for an Overwound World, out this month. This is also the month in which George Monbiot chose to trash the reputation of the middle-classes’ favourite icon of the bucolic life – presumably in an effort to distance himself from accusations being a middle-class activist himself.

That’s not to say the image doesn’t sum up Andrew Price’s thesis pretty succinctly. The big disappointment with the book is not his demolition of the idea that “efficiency” has anything to do with social progress or environmental sustainability. That’s all good. But it starts to get a bit shaky when it turns out that his inspirations for the idea of slow-tech seem to be based more on nostalgia than any idea idea of sustainability. Aside from the now-reviled Aga, Price champions his father’s old petrol-glugging Bentley, and the old family sailing boat. As I say in the review on the main site, his idea of sustainable living soon starts to look a little like a rather jolly picnic in a BBC2 period drama rather than a real manifesto.

Visit the RSA Arts & Ecology website.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology Blog