The debate surrounding sustainability is ubiquitous: hardly any other term has become so firmly established in everyday language in recent years.
Yet this is no longer confined to environmental issues alone. We also strive to make socially sustainable decisions in our interpersonal relationships, and there is hardly a company that does not capitalise on the buzzword ‘sustainability’ in some form or another to promote a wide variety of products and services, attract new segments of customers and maximise profits.
But what is sustainability really – beyond its overused status as a linguistic fad? What does the term encompass today? Which components and dimensions need to be taken into account? And what does sustainability mean in relation to culture, or specifically within the context of design and exhibitions?
We would like to discuss these and similar questions together at the second event in our ‘gewerk in the garden’ series. To this end, we have invited speakers from different disciplines who will provide us with both theoretical and practical insights into the topic through thought-provoking presentations.
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Project Team
Gewerkdesign
Stefan Rothert
Birgit Schlegel
Jens Imig
Georgina Prüßing Mascarenhas
Christina Storch
Antoine Laurent
Jens H. Lohmann
Resümee
In her lecture, the philosopher Eva-Maria Heinze examined sustainability from the perspective of practical philosophy, which is understood as the academic study of human action and its normative assessment. Drawing on Albert Schweitzer’s (1875–1965) ethics of reverence for life, she explained the interconnections between ethics and culture, pointing to the close interdependence between culture and nature, which must by no means be conceived as dichotomous concepts or spheres, but rather understood as interrelated and reciprocal; after all, in its original sense, culture primarily refers to the cultivation of life.
As a pioneer of a global culture of sustainability, Schweitzer advocates a biocentric ethics of nature, which regards all living beings, including plant organisms, as ethically significant. His ethics should be understood as an ethics of conviction. He is concerned with a general attitude towards life in all its forms and manifestations. Accordingly, actions such as the wanton destruction of living organisms and natural objects are to be rejected, as they are based on a negative, dismissive attitude towards nature.
Building on Albert Schweitzer’s philosophy, Dr Heinze presented the ‘ethics of co-existence’ developed by the philosopher Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich (1936–2018), which represents an extension of Schweitzer’s concept of sustainability. This is a physiocentric (holistic) ethics of nature, which explicitly regards parts of seemingly inanimate nature (such as minerals or rocks), as well as the four elements—understood as the foundation of all life—as ethically relevant.
This theoretical introduction to the topic was followed by a lecture from Verena Michels, which offered an application-oriented perspective on sustainability with specific reference to the context of cultural production.
She presented the project SORRY WE ARE TRYING Biomaterials in Practice, which she initiated together with Vlasta Kubušová: a practice-oriented design exhibition focusing on the implementation of new, fossil-free approaches to the design, production and utilisation of materials and products.
An exhibition in Bratislava in 2021/22, curated by Verena Michels and Vlasta Kubušová, showcased a group of international designers and studios dedicated to researching and establishing biomaterials, thereby seeking to tackle the plastic problem. The designers featured in the exhibition develop and produce high-quality materials and a wide variety of aesthetically refined everyday objects, working with fruit peels, banana fibres, cellulose, fungal mycelium and plant-based bioplastics.
Before explaining the individual projects by the exhibiting designers, the speaker posed the following question, which is fundamental to their work: “What can we learn by deconstructing the value chain and zooming in on the stages of research, cultivation, harvesting, fermentation, shaping, sewing, dyeing, transport, packaging, and so on?”
During her talk, the speaker also highlighted the challenges and problems that designers faced during their respective product and material development processes – and which still need to be addressed – including: the fragility of the materials; moving beyond the testing and experimentation phase and transitioning to industrial production systems; and the current lack of compatibility between biomaterials and existing waste management systems.
Against the backdrop of this event and the subsequent discussion with those interested in cultural and social issues, designers and other stakeholders from the cultural and exhibition sectors, the following conclusions can be drawn:
Sustainability as a guiding principle, as the basis for decision-making, permeates every aspect of our society and is far more complex than simply doing without plastic bags. In line with the sustainability paradigm, the production of objects must inevitably take their subsequent reuse into account; in this way, it can contribute not only to a fulfilling life for human actors, but also to a meaningful extension of the life of other objects and organisms, by subjecting their form of existence to a sort of metamorphosis and endowing them with new meanings and functions.
It is also, and above all, a matter of bringing about change in the systemic conditions and the structures of production and society’s relationship with our natural environment. Culture and cultural production hold great potential for sustainable development. They can make an important contribution to the dissemination of knowledge, the stimulation of reflective processes, and the fostering of political and environmental awareness; however, in doing so, they should also critically reflect on their own structures and forms of organisation, seek dialogue and build networks.
