Making Carbon: A Materials Workshop Series on Durability (2022 – 2024)

This workshop series is organized by Marjolijn Bol, Grace Kim-Butler, and Sanli Faez. With coordination and support from Diede Farhosh-Van Loon and Anne-Floor de Kanter, and the project’s student assistants Elise Alkemade and Svetla Panagieva.

This series of hands-on workshops  will bring together humanists, scientists, and artists to bridge conversations about “sustainability” and “durability” across disciplines. The workshops center on the broad theme of “Making Carbon,” and each  will explore a separate set of materials: 1) ‘Mushrooming Plastics’; 2) ‘Dyes That Last?’ 3) ‘Bring Your Own Soil’ and 4) Speculation under Lab Conditions.

This project is in collaboration with the Material CoLABoratory Project (funded by the Utrecht Young Academy).

Workshop 1: September 13-14, 2022: Workshop ‘Mushrooming Plastics’ (MatLab Utrecht)

A group of scientists and artists, amongst whom conceptual material designer Shahar Livne, oceanographer and climate scientist Erik van Sebille , mechanical engineer Li Shen, microbiologist Martin Tegelaar,  physicist nanophotonics Sanli Faez and medical humanities researcher Anne-Floor de Kanter, gathered together to have a productive conversation around plastic materials—and their various “mushroomings.” Together they explored the paradoxical relationship between the material properties of durability and degradation amid recent research into plastics decomposition and substitution.

Workshop 2: December 14-15, 2022: Workshop ‘Dyes that Last?’ (MatLab Utrecht)

In this workshop a group of (visiting) artists and scientists, amongst whom social anthropologist Laurence Douny, designer Nienke Hoogvliet, physicist Riccardo Sapienza, physicist Lisa Tran and physicist nanophotonics Sanli Faez, will challenge culturally encoded ideas about how to achieve the durability of color in materials such as textiles – and why – across scientific and humanistic research.

Workshop 3: July 11, 2023: ‘Bring Your Own Soil’ (Utrecht University Artlab)

This 1-day workshop brought together renowned ceramicists and scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds examine how researchers and artists use soil materials from deep time and ancient human history to forecast into the future and or solve current social and environmental problems. (with: Alison Boyd, Thijs Hagendijk, Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen, Jie Chen (Studio website) (indepedent ceramicist), Peter Oakley (Royal College Art, material culture), Leonard Witte (studio website) (independent ceramicist).

Workshop 4: August 28-29, 2024: Speculation under Lab Conditions (Utrecht University Artlab)

How are material, embodied practices shaping imagination? In this hands-on workshop, we’ll reorient the lab as a space for speculative fiction writing, using it as a basis for experimental making. Speculative fiction—including sci-fi, fantasy, magical realism, and more—pairs well with labs. Labs not only inspire worldbuilding but are themselves speculative spaces where scientific imagination guides research, method, and analysis. Through individual and collaborative exercises framed by “sustainability,” we’ll playfully explore material qualities and writing, warping concepts like stickiness, solubility, acidification, and desalination. Using familiar lab tools (pigments, pH strips, fume hoods, water), we’ll dream askew and encourage creative exploration of:

– the interplay of materials and text in imagining;

– the effects of imagining with unexpected combinations of sensory experience; and,

– how the ways we inhabit a space shape both what and how we imagine.

The workshop is organized by Dr. Amy Johnson, speculative fiction author, anthologist, and anthropologist of language and technology, and Dr. Grace Kim-Butler, anthropologist of art, science, and technology. See also the visual blogpost they published as part of this project.

Participants: