Active matter and environmental relations

About the panelists

Alice Jarry

Dr. Alice Jarry is Associate professor of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University. She is Research Chair in Critical Practices in Materials and Materiality, Co-Director of Hexagram – International Network dedicated to Research-Creation in Media Arts, Design, Technology and Digital Culture, and Director of the Milieux Institute Speculative Life Biolab. As an artist-researcher, she specializes in site-specific works, art-science practices and socio-environmental design. Her research brings concerns about aesthetics, and politics to bear critically upon material production and infrastructures. Focusing on residual matter and active biomaterials/composites for the built environment and the arts, Jarry examines how materiality – engaged in processes of transformation with site, technology, and communities – can provoke the emergence of resilient socio-environmental relations. Her works have been presented internationally at Centre George Pompidou, Planétarium de Montréal, Vox Centre de l’image Contemporaine, Biennale Nemo, Leonardo Da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology, Digital Arts Biennial, and Device_Art Triennale, among other locations.

Natalija Miodragovic

The starting point for the interdisciplinary and experimental work of Dipl. Ing. Arch. Natalija Miodragovic, M.A. Arch (Staedelschule), is art and spatial practices as vehicles for social change. She works in cooperation with artists, scientists, and within the field of academic research. The focus of her work is the perception and understanding of space, as well as lightweight, flexible, foldable, and textile structures. Research includes: since 2019, Research associate, Object Space Agency interdisciplinary cluster Matters of Activity; 2016–2018, Foldable, Insulating Textiles in Architecture under Prof. Lueling. Teaching: Institute for Architecture-Based Art, TU Braunschweig; KHB Weissensee Berlin. Among other works, she is the author of Organ Instrument Sound, air, Light (2019–ongoing) Berlin with 333, the Serbian Pavilion at EXPO 2010, and, from 2002–2015, partner,co-author of a series of large-scale accessible projects and exhibitions in collaboration with artists Tomas Saraceno Biosphere, Geodesic solar balloon, cloud city.

Charlett Wenig

Interdisciplinary material and product designer Charlett Wenig has a unique and hands-on approach towards the work with mostly underrated materials like bones and bark. Not only does she collaborate with experts in different fields of science and manufacturing to understand the material its entirety, but she is also steadily looking for new ways to create distinctive and aesthetic design objects. Her expertise as a material designer has paved her way towards a career in the sciences, working in the Max Planck Institute of Colloid and Interfaces to investigate the usage of bark for design purposes. The entanglement with a scientific approach towards material is an essential part of her design thinking. The close collaboration with experts in the field of manufacturing, like woodworkers, butchers, potters and many more uniquely specialized craftsmen, is vital to her understanding of the material itself and the possible metamorphosis it may undergo to create a new object. The objects have a strong aesthetic appeal, that cater to the possibilities of the material and the circumstances of their final function. Organic materials are her main focus, more specifically underrated materials that often occur as a by-product of mass produced matter like wood or meat.