2016 – REALIZING POTENTIALS – workshop + exhibition Barcelona

Realising Potentials: Arts-based sustainability science is a two-day workshop conceived as an experiential site for exploration and dialogue between the arts and sustainability science.
The workshop takes place at Barcelona (Spain), November 3rd-4th, 2016 at the Institute of Catalan Studies (Institut d’Estudis Catalans, IEC).

Two main motivations guide the workshop:
To open up an experiential space where artists and scientists can share, connect and expand different experiences, projects and discussions in the field of arts-based sustainability research.
To catalyse a network of Arts-based Sustainability Science as a community of learning, practice and mutual support.
During the workshop, participants engage in different experiential laboratories and discussions to share, collectively explore and critically inquire different experiences of arts-science hybridation.

Participants will share art and research projects directly developed within collaborations among artists and scientists.
They will reflect upon following questions:
– How did the opportunity to integrate visual arts and sustainability science emerge in your project?
– Which challenges you dealt with along the process?
– What are the potentialities (the added values and future paths) of integrating visual arts within sustainability science?

IMG_1265

The GUERILLA BEEHIVE is a project on the edge between art and science, focusing on issues of sustainability, more specifically the survival of the honeybee species, and using new materials and new digital fabrication technologies, more specifically, sustainable bioplastics. The project centers on the development of a radically new beehive that can be placed in any kind of environment, including urban environments. The beehive is not intended for commercial honey exploitation, but it offers a shelter to swarming bee colonies and it is thus supporting pollination and biodiversity. Moreover, the beehive is enhanced with non intrusive technology to monitor the wellbeing of the colony and it can also be used as a sensing device to measure the ecological status of the environment. The project evokes the pressing issue why there is at the moment widespread colony collapse, not using scientific methods but using artistic methods in order to raise public awareness and research drastically new materials and observation methods. The Guerilla Beehive is a functional artwork, a shelter to sustain the endangered. Apis mellifera species. It is not a beehive for honey production, but it aims to support the bee colonies as pollinators and guardians of biodiversity. The proposed project involves a strong engagement with the biological and computing sciences as well as with DIY (do-it-yourself) technologies and digital fabrication. By creating imaginative and poetic sculptures and structures, I explore with ‘the Guerilla Beehive’ the interaction between nature and culture through the lens of art, material science, and biology.

https://artbasedsustainability.tumblr.com/
Realising Potentials_Mock-up_FINAL