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Material Encounter

## Material Encounters

Transcript summary of lecture event, organized by Materiality Research Group in collaboration with The Netherlands Institute for Conservation+Art+Science+ (NICAS), moderated by Márk Redele.

Tuesday, 17 December 2024, GRA/SI Library

Despite severe winds battering in the Netherlands causing widespread disruptions of public transport, we were able to gather on 17 December, 2024, in the library of Gerrit Rietveld Academie to welcome three speakers and attendees to the sixth and final event of the “How Material Comes to Matter” series.

To start the evening Márk Redele brought up the term transposition. Transposition might be familiar to some for example, from music, where a song can be transposed from one key to another, or from a drawing that might be distorted based on a set of rules. In general, transposition refers to a dynamic where one thing is moved or shifted from one domain to another while maintaining its essential properties and intrinsic relationships.

In the book Transpositions: Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research, the authors reflect on how, in artistic practice, this movement between different contexts or disciplines can help generate new insights. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger states that transposition takes things from one context and through this operation things are “brought into a constellation where we can marvel at and do things with them.” Transposition activates a model that enables interaction with complex environments that are otherwise resistant to interaction or pose ethical challenges. Yve Lomax, in her contribution to the book, attempts to articulate how something can be had without being possessed.

Márk proposed that all three invited guests—and the practices they bring—share a core dynamic: the movement of elements from one context to another.

Julia Ihls is overseeing the Bio Design Lab at the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe, which is a material library and laboratory with close ties to the Black Forest in Germany. The lab and its location enables working on and with the materials of the forest and the region.

Clem Edwards is a Rotterdam-based artist who gathers materials through encounter. Their work merges language and sculpture to explore materiality, labor, and societal conditions. These materials make their way into small installations with complex interrelated dynamics. Little environments where things balance and hold each other while they hint at larger interconnected systems. Clem also makes tiny houses out of rice. They can be held, carried, and they afford handling this way, which in turn helps to imagine relationships beyond the nuclear family.
Marjolijn Bol, associate professor of technical art history at Utrecht University and principal investigator of the research project “Dynamics of the Durable,” funded by the European Research Council (ERC), pays attention to art objects from the past and the present. These objects need to be brought into some kind of investigative realm in order to gain insight into the composition of materials in them and to apply transformations to speculate on their durability, value etc.

Each speaker offered their unique perspective on materiality, temporality, preservation, and the intersection of human and non-human worlds—worlds and phenomena that often seem too large, dynamic, complex, fragile, or elusive to be investigated or grasped.

Questions that were explored during the evening were:

Julia’s presentation titled “Shifting to Drifting by Design: An Ecotonal Practice at the Interface of Design and Natural Science,” offered a brief introduction to the topic of Biodesign, a field operating at the intersection of design and the natural sciences.

According to Julia, the concept of “shifting ground” resonates with an understanding of the world as becoming increasingly complex and deeply interconnected. An event as seemingly distant as a ship blocking the Suez Canal demonstrates how global trade can be affected in unexpected ways.

In the book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, anthropologist Anna Tsing describes friction as “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference.” Such encounters between diverse and conflicting worlds hold the potential to generate new cultural and power arrangements. The challenge is to make this friction productive, particularly when it emerges at the intersection of disciplines, spatial configurations, funding structures, or temporalities.

Julia’s discussion then turned to matter and materiality. Contemporary discourse, including new materialism and posthumanism, suggests that matter possesses its own agency—an autonomous existence with contradictions and conditions. This perspective is particularly relevant in Biodesign, where the integration of living materials and organisms into design challenges conventional notions of materiality. Biodesign extends beyond familiar concepts such as biomimicry or cradle-to-cradle design. It involves incorporating living organisms and ecosystems into design processes, dissolving the boundaries between natural and built environments to create hybrid typologies.

Working with living organisms introduces both ethical and practical considerations. It prompts critical questions such as: Could life forms be engaged without reducing them to mere tools or materials? Is it possible to respect even microscopic life, incorporating it into design without exploitation? Furthermore, how might designers cultivate an empathetic approach toward these life forms, allowing them a degree of autonomy in the design process?

Elvin Karana’s framework of “living artifacts” offers valuable principles for working with living materials:

A well-known example of Biodesign in practice is Neri Oxman’s Silk Pavilion. In this project, over 70,000 silkworms engaged in the creation of a hybrid material. Traditionally, silkworms are cultivated for their silk, a process that often resulted in their destruction. In the Silk Pavilion, however, the silkworms are allowed to complete their natural cycle without harm, demonstrating an alternative approach to integrating living organisms into design ethically.

The temporality of Biodesign materials presents another significant challenge. Many of these materials are biodegradable, yet questions arise regarding their durability. How can materials be designed to degrade naturally while remaining functional within the built environment? Achieving this balance between longevity and biodegradability remains a key consideration.

Additionally, Biodesign necessitates a shift in scale. Traditional design operates primarily within the human scale, but Biodesign expands this perspective to include microorganisms, plant systems, and entire ecosystems. Temporality also needs to be reconsidered. While fungi might take months or years to grow, human lifespans are significantly shorter. This shift in scale—whether in terms of body, operation, time, or aesthetics— fundamentally alters the way design has been approached.

The transition from shifting to drifting involves navigating unstable grounds. The Bio Design Lab in Karlsruhe, established in 2020, exemplifies an approach that fosters interdisciplinary collaboration between art, science, and design. Unlike traditional laboratories, which are sterile and closed environments, this lab has been designed to facilitate open exchange and communication. It serves as both a research space and a platform for exhibitions and education, providing an opportunity to experiment with living materials in an open, dynamic setting.

One initiative developed within the lab is the “Living Library”—a material library featuring biodegradable and temporary materials derived from waste. This resource provides designers, artists, and scientists with the opportunity to experiment with novel Biodesign materials. Additionally, international summer schools hosted at the lab bring together participants from diverse backgrounds to collaboratively explore the future of life through hands-on projects and discussions.

Archiving living materials presents another intriguing challenge. For example, photogrammetry has been used to digitally preserve SCOBY cultures (bacterial cellulose), allowing for the documentation of living materials without halting their natural cycles. This raises the fundamental question: Can digital archives adequately capture the dynamic nature of living materials, or do they merely serve as static records of something that is in constant transformation?

Ultimately, Biodesign offers an opportunity to engage directly with the material world through attunement to ecological and disciplinary intersections—what could be called ecotonal spaces. The philosopher Karen Barad states that “knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing, but from direct material engagement with the world.” By embracing this direct engagement, it becomes possible to navigate the shifting, drifting, and often unstable grounds of Biodesign, fostering new possibilities for collaboration, care, and innovation.

Marjolijn Bol

Marjolijn Bol’s lecture began with a reading of a passage from H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which described a far-future museum in what had once been London. In this distant era, the time traveler encountered a vast, dilapidated structure made of porcelain, complete with inscriptions and skeletal remains, evoking a powerful image of enduring human artifacts. This passage was used to introduce the central theme of the talk: the history and notion of durability in art and cultural heritage.

Marjolijn then connected Wells’s vision to contemporary practices of conservation and restoration, emphasizing that museums had long served as custodians of art and cultural objects, preserving items that ranged from 13th-century paintings to ancient ceramics and gold relics. She argued that the institutional practices of collection, preservation, and repair in Western Europe had shaped what was considered valuable, while also raising questions about the inherent durability of these artifacts. But where did this institutional quest for long-lasting stuff come from?

Marjolijn reflected on this question by exploring the initial impulse behind creating lasting objects, which was the question of how past artisans had experimented with making objects that could endure, and why their patrons desired art with such lasting power. She introduced her ERC-research project, known by its acronym DURARE, which focused on the history of durability in art. The project examines historical texts and legal documents—from guild regulations and warranty declarations to recipe treatises—to uncover how durability was defined and achieved in different eras. For instance, a 12th-century recipe by the monk Theophilus described a special varnish intended to make art objects permanent, highlighting the deliberate intention behind ensuring an object’s longevity.

Historical reconstructions are used as a methodological tool to investigate these recipes. One example involved recreating fake gems according to a fourth-century formula, in which crystals were colored with copper green by cracking and dyeing them to mimic the appearance of emeralds. These practical experiments offered insights into the technical challenges and time scales involved in producing durable art, as well as the cultural assumptions about longevity that varied between epochs.

Marjolijn contrasted Western approaches to durability with alternative models. In Western art conservation, objects are often “frozen in time” and preserved meticulously, which underscores a desire to maintain the original state of an artifact. She illustrated this by references to a painting and a sculpture—one a panel painting that was expected to last over 500 years if properly varnished, and the other a marble sculpture by Michelangelo, intended for eternal remembrance despite inevitable changes over time. In contrast, the lecture referred to examples such as the Naikū Shrine in Japan, which was rebuilt every 20 years, thereby preserving cultural practices rather than static artifacts.

Furthermore, the lecture ventured into contemporary debates about durability by discussing modern artistic interventions. She presented the example of Banksy, where the transformation of street art into a framed, auctioned piece can be seen as a commentary on institutionalized durability and the commercialization of art. This led her to broader reflections on how the historical legacy of crafting enduring objects influences current practices and values regarding cultural heritage.

Finally, Marjolijn touched on emerging projects that further questioned traditional notions of permanence. An example included an art installation created from nuclear waste, intended to be housed in a nuclear waste storage facility as a time capsule for 1,000 years. This project raised ethical and practical questions about the treatment of toxic materials and the responsibilities of preserving art far into the future.

Overall, Marjolijn’s lecture presented an elaborate exploration of durability as both a technical and cultural phenomenon. It examined how historical practices, legal frameworks, and artisanal recipes contributed to a tradition of making art objects last, and it challenged the audience to reconsider whether striving for eternal durability was always desirable or even feasible in today’s rapidly changing cultural landscape.

Clem Edwards

Clem presented a choice to their audience between two texts—one about rats and another, a newer, rougher poem on white phosphorus. The audience opted for the latter, and Clem proceeded with a reading, setting the stage with an image from their studio, meant as a visual anchor for what is primarily an auditory experience.

Clem reminded us the talk was framed around the concept of transposition, which they interpreted both in a literal editorial sense—where letters and words are reordered—and in a broader poetic and material sense, where ideas, objects, and histories shift and take on new meaning. They reflected on their own practice as an artist and writer, drawing parallels between sculptural assemblage and the process of repositioning words and concepts in storytelling.

The reading began with a childhood memory of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl, a tale steeped in European folk traditions of suffering and magical visions. Clem contrasted this with their Australian upbringing, reflecting on how storytelling has historically oscillated between the uncanny and the mundane, the extraordinary and the ordinary. They noted how the rise of the realist novel marked a move away from the mystical and into the realm of the rational, mirroring the industrial transformation of human society.

From here, the focus shifted to phosphorus, an element with a dark and storied past. The audience was transported to 1669, where a German merchant-alchemist, Henning Brand, discovers phosphorus while boiling down vast quantities of urine in search of the Philosopher’s Stone. This luminous, waxy substance, named after the celestial morning star, later finds its way into 19th-century matchstick factories, where young women and girls labor in toxic conditions, inhaling phosphorus fumes until their very bones begin to glow and rot—a gruesome disease known as phossy jaw.

The narrative then leaps forward to the industrial era, where phosphorus becomes essential for modern warfare, used in munitions, most infamously in incendiary bombs. Clem recounted its role in the the World War Two bombing campaign, tracing its continued presence in the landscape—how, even in 2017, an unsuspecting beach goer in Hamburg mistook a remnant of white phosphorus for amber, only to have it ignite spontaneously in their pocket.

The timeline extended to the 21st century, where Clem linked phosphorus to its continued deployment in conflict zones, specifically Gaza. They referenced reports documenting the Israeli military’s use of white phosphorus munitions during Operation Cast Lead in 2009, describing the indiscriminate devastation it wrought on civilians, hospitals, and schools. They noted how legal loopholes allow phosphorus to evade classification as a chemical weapon, despite its lethal effects.

Throughout the reading, Clem wove together personal and historical threads, revealing a deeply entangled lineage of phosphorus—from the alchemist’s basement to colonial industry, from imperial warfare to modern geopolitical violence. This meditation on phosphorus as both a material and a metaphor led to a final reflection on inheritance: “the stories we tell, the legacies we bear, and the choices we make in framing history.” In a poignant closing revelation, Clem shared an image of their grandfather, who most likely dropped white phosphorus marker-bombs over Hamburg during World War II—making their own connection to this toxic inheritance all the more direct and visceral.

The talk ended on a contemplative note, returning to the act of storytelling itself. Clem imagined striking a match, illuminating a constellation of connections across time—“between a morning star, a factory girl, an alchemist, a war zone, and a piece of land still burning.” They expressed a desire to rewrite and rethink these inherited narratives, questioning whose stories get told and who is granted the humanity to be remembered.

With this, the presentation closed, leaving the audience to sit with the weight of history, the mutability of storytelling, and the ethical responsibility of bearing witness.