TNOC Festival 2024

This seed session will bring together city shapers from different backgrounds, sectors, and contexts who represent the urban greening supply and value chains. It will aim to showcase the many stakeholders involved in shaping greener cities, discuss challenges and gaps, and ultimately explore ways to better enable bold action and effective delivery of urban greening initiatives that harness the power of plants. Join the discussion and contribute to the session by sharing more about your role in shaping greener cities. 

This session aims to improve participants' skills to analyze biodiversity components and situations within the built environment, and to provide the knowledge to support and enhance existing biodiversity components, or where none are present, to provide them, without imposing undue maintenance and financial burdens, all to improve the urban environment for all occupiers and users, human as well as animal.

www.swift-conservation.org

Urban botany themed-poetry session interspersing readings with activities to support and encourage the creation of poems by attendees. My poetry explores plant origins and history, the nature of migration and how what is categorised as weed or flower has something powerful to say about boundaries, borders, and belonging. I will also be joined by poet Suzannah Evans and public speaker Mike Weston.
Suzannah Evans is a poet, editor and tutor based in Sheffield, with collections Near Future (2018) and Space Baby (2022)  published by Nine Arches Press. She has a pamphlet forthcoming with Bad Betty Press this year, exploring environmental themese. https://suzannahevans.org/
Mike Weston has worked in green energy development. He is active and award winning Toastmaster, interested in public speaking, performance, podcasting and blogwriting.

Authors from the book, ‘Urban Natures: Living the More-than-Human City’ will discuss the need to shift to a more-than-human perspective; the power of imagining new relationships and cityscapes; and the importance of introducing cross-disciplinary, -sectoral, and -cultural perspectives to envision this change. Contributors will aim to produce an ‘urban manifesto’ towards realizing what a more-than-human city could look like.

Overview:

The nature of encountering other species can lead to multiplicity of emotional reactions that would be impossible to transcribe in complete detail here. This seed session aims to open a dialogue in which people can express their relationships with nature and look to how we can see the nature that is all around us. The session will look at the species found in our urban cities before looking more hollistically at wider global natures. Rather than looking at why people do not choose to engage with the outdoors, the focus of this session is to spotlight the ways people unknowingly connect with nature. The premise of this session is that the acknowledgement of humanity with natural systems allows everyone to engage with nature in unique ways.Subsequently, by looking at people's emotional reactions to species encounters wider questions will be asked about how to build conservation capacity for the benefit of planetary health.

About the session host:

The session will be run by Keir Chauhan a third-year undergraduate student specialising in Environmental Histories at University College London. Keir has worked with numerous conservation organisations especially on the subject of engagement and history. Keir is also a passionate birdwatcher and enjoys the benefits of being outside for his health when living in London.

We will dive into the realm of systems thinking in this workshop, which is dedicated to navigating complexity and accommodate ideas to discuss suitable action for tackling urban challenges. We will get together, use mapping tools to start conversations around interconnectedness, brainstorm and advance capacities for system-level change.

The embodiment of climate crisis is uniquely defined spatially by experiencing it phenomenologically. Seeing and sensing it through immersing the human body in polluted landscapes can generate imaginative digital research. This session explores how art and visualisation can bridge gaps between what is visible and what is not, when investigating the visual embodiment of climate change in and around cities.

This session brings together participatory experiences from Europe and South America co-producing living schoolyards and multi-functional models of site-specific green infrastructure. We will discuss contributions to health and well-being, biodiversity, and nature-based learning. Other topics include potential barriers to broad implementation of the living schoolyard and corcerns related to biocultural diversity in the implementation of international NBS agendas in cities of the global South.

Minecraft is the world's most-played video game and its mechanics are rooted in creativity and collaboration. During this session we'll be using Minecraft to design and build nature-based solutions around the event venue, using a virtual model of Berlin. Come along, have fun, play and learn about the potential of gaming as a medium for engaging people in sustainable cities.

To visit sites of diverse urban natures across Berlin prompting discussion between hosts, stakeholders and participants about the relationships, politics and possibilities for human/nonhuman co-existence in cities. This field trip seeks to ground and extend the urban manifesto drafted in the seed session, ‘What does a more-than-human city “look” like?’, through participation with attendees and site representatives in Berlin’s cityscape.

We will meet at the gates of Atelier Gardens at 9.30am and finish at 12 noon near UllsteinStr. there is a bus that runs to Herrmannstr. to return. The walk is around 2.5km and covers paved paths, grassy surfaces and some uneven ground. There is one place with steep steps going down, and then back up again (though this section could be skipped). There are no toilets on the route. Please dress for the weather.

The group will meet at Atelier Gardens at the Yellow Building near the coffee shop inside the yellow building.


Oberlandstraße 26-35, 12099 Berlin, Germany

Google link: https://maps.app.goo.gl/CzLj2LdrSQNREMLK8



 

Stories from the Underground 

Stories from the Underground brings ethnobotanical and botanical researchers, curators and artists together from the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, the University of Amsterdam, CDE and Kulturschöpfer e.V. Berlin, a non-profit gallery and cultural hub that focuses on bringing together art, business, and social issues.

You are welcome to join us for our TNOC field trip based at Kulturschöpfer e.V. and a local park in Friedrichshain. One of Berlin's most cultural areas, Friedrichshain is home to numerous artist, design and media companies. Known for its many bars, clubs, pubs, and cafés, concentrated in the vicinity of Simon-Dach-Straße and Boxhagener Platz. There were numerous squats in Friedrichshain, with many in and around Rigaer Straße, Mainzer Straße and Scharnweberstraße. Kulturschöpfer e.V. is a non-profit artist-led association that focuses on bringing together art, business, and social issues in one space founded in 2013.

This Biophilic city art and science exploration of what is underneath Friedrichshain in Berlin, linking nature and deep time. Drawing on our TNOC virtual Signs of the Underground event, it is an iopportunity for you to explore the space between reality and dream as deep nature time. You will be invited to actively co-produce your creative responses at GreenHill Gallery and in the local park to discover what underground city nature feels like with scientists and artists.

We will start at 10 am CET at Kulturschöpfer e.V. Grünberger Str. 13, 10243 Berlin Greenhill Gallery, please arrive from 9:30 am CET for coffee/tea ready to start our field trip to a local park at 10 am. Finish by midday CET.

The field trip will be lead by:

Baiba Pruse
Baiba's is based at the University of Amsterdam, her work as an ethnobotanist is linked to local ecological knowledge regarding wild plant uses and citizen engagement in environmental change observation. She is strongly supporting the research strategy of transdisciplinary and collaborative work with artists.

Poppy Flint
Poppy is currently working on ‘Underfoot’, a perception-shifting installation that quite literally shines a light on the humble root system and creates a poignant setting to encounter stories and questions about human’s relationship with nature. She is an educator, artist, and a stubborn optimist.
poppyflint.com/underfoot/

Justin Stewart
Justin is an evolutionary ecologist investigating plant-microbial symbiosis. Currently, their work focuses on using mapping mycorrhizal fungal symbiosis from individual root systems up to global biodiversity maps. They are a PhD Candidate Data Ecologist at VU Amsterdam and SPUN. The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks

Christopher Elmerick
Director and cultural curator at Greenhill gallery kulturschoepfer Berlin. Kulturschöpfer e.V. is a non-profit association that has been concentrating since 2013 on bringing together the fields of art, business and social affairs in one space. People from Berlin and all over the world come here to get involved, create something together and inspire each other. In this way, we want to have a positive influence on the city of Berlin and our neighbourhood. Christopher has a passion to see all of culture holistically in all of its diversity by engaging, creating, and inspiring one another in community towards positive change.

Artist Jaime Jackson will contribute to the event on-line, he is a biophilic (love of nature) socially engaged and studio-based artist. Currently artist producer for the Arts Council England funded The Sign of the Underground,
This is a Culture Declares Emergency Birmingham Hub Offer event for The Nature Of Cities Festival, part of an Arts Council England funded Herefordshire New Leaf commissioning program. Part of the Sign of the Underground program, an artist and scientist-led gathering of 3 areas of subterranean city tendrils which includes:

1. The latest scientist research on the underground mycorrhizal network (that connects the roots of a plant with fungi), as well as Biophilia (love of nature), and deep time.
2. Linking these hidden pathways with what is underfoot in cities and towns, (pollution, pipes. cables, water).
3. Connecting nature with ethnomycology, underground grass roots eco-movements and marginalized communities.

www.kulturschoepfer.de
https://youtu.be/0-hS4HoW5fM?feature=shared