The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1, The Museum of Modern Art (Film Entrance) 11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
One and a half months before the opening of the XXII Triennale, Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival, The Museum of Modern Art will host the second Broken Nature symposium, to explore the notion of restorative design. Drawing on architecture, urban planning, geopolitics, linguistics, and other overlapping fields of research, the symposium will trace design’s potential to repair humans’ collapsing bonds with nature, and offer a dynamic exchange of opinions through individual presentations, panel conversations, a debate, and video contributions.
2:00–2:30 Opening remarks Welcome by Glenn Lowry, Director of The Museum of Modern Art
Remarks by Stefano Boeri, President of La Triennale di Milano
Introduction by Paola Antonelli, Curator of the XXII Triennale
2:30–3:00 Keynote no.1
Ursula K. Heise Ursula K. Heise is the Marcia H. Howard Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and former President of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment). She is a co-founder of UCLA’s Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS), which launched in October 2016.
3:00–4:30 Session no.1
Heather Davis Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, the New School in New York. Her current book project traces the ethology of plastic and its links to petrocapitalism. She has written about the intersection of art, politics, ecology, and community engagement for numerous art and academic publications, and is the editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015.)
Karthik Dinakar Karthik Dinakar is a graduate student, research assistant, and a Reid Hoffman Fellow at the MIT Media Lab in the Software Agents & Affective Computing Groups. He started the Applied Machine Learning and the Cambridge Computational Clinical Psychology Org interest groups at MIT and Harvard. He is interested in large scale bayesian data science – scalable machine learning, probabilistic graphical models, human-in-the-loop computation and fail-soft computing – and natural language processing.
Teddy Cruz & Fonna Forman Teddy Cruz is a professor of Public Culture and Urbanism in the UCSD Department of Visual Arts. Fonna Forman is a professor of Political Theory and the Founding Director of the Center on Global Justice at the University of California, San Diego. Together they are principals in Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, a research-based political and architectural practice in San Diego, investigating issues of informal urbanization, civic infrastructure and public culture, with a particular emphasis on border conditions.
Conversation moderated by Paola Antonelli Audience Q&A
4:30–4:45 Coffee
4:45–5:15 Keynote no.2
Maurice Cox
Maurice Cox has been the Director of the City of Detroit’s Planning Department since 2015. An urban designer, architectural educator and former mayor of the City of Charlottesville, VA, he left a tenured position with Tulane University in New Orleans to accept the Detroit position. He has taught at Syracuse University, the University of Virginia and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. In 2013, he was named one of the Most Admired Design Educators in America in the annual ranking of Design Intelligence.
5:15–6:30 Session no.2
Dori Tunstall
Dori Tunstall is a design anthropologist, researcher, academic leader, writer, and educator. She is Dean, Faculty of Design at OCAD University (Ontario College of Art and Design University) in Toronto, Canada and the first black Dean of a Faculty of Design anywhere. She has taught at Swinburne University and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She directed the U.S. National Design Policy Initiative and Design for Democracy.
Susannah Drake
Susannah Drake is a principal and founder of DLANDstudio, and a leader in resilient urban design who has dedicated much of her practice to developing and implementing design strategies to confront the impacts of climate change. Her project “A New Urban Ground,” a collaboration with ARO Architects in MoMA’s 2010 “Rising Currents: Projects of New York’s Waterfront” exhibition, set a design precedent in urban waterfront resiliency.
Neri Oxman
Architect and designer Neri Oxman is the Sony Corporation Career Development Professor and Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where she founded and directs the Mediated Matter design research group. Her group strives to enhance the relationship between the built and the natural environments by employing design principles inspired by nature and implementing them in the invention of novel digital design technologies.
Conversation moderated by Paola Antonelli Audience Q&A
6:30–7:30 Final debate
“This House believes that civil disobedience is needed to force governments and corporations to act to assure our survival.’’
PRO Antonia Juhasz
Antonia Juhasz is a leading energy analyst, activist, author, and investigative journalist specializing in oil. She founded and runs the (Un)Covering Oil Investigative Reporting Program, a project of the Society of Environmental Journalists. She is a 2017 Yale University Poynter Fellow in Journalism and a 2013 Investigative Journalism Fellow of UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
AGAINST Cara Smyth
Cara Smyth is Executive Board Member and Founding Vice President of Glasgow Caledonian University New York (GCNYC), and Founder of the Fair Fashion Center, a think tank that focuses on the intersection of profitability and sustainability. By mediating between the language of not-for-profits and the language of business, the Fair Fashion Center proves the business case for sustainability by turning global issues into industry opportunities.
7:30–8:30 Reception
8:30–10:40 Movie Screening
Winged Migration (2001)
by Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cluzaud, and Michel Debats. “For eighty million years, birds have ruled the skies, seas and earth. Each Spring, they fly vast distances. Each Fall, they fly the same route back. This film is the result of four years of following their amazing odysseys, in the Northern Hemisphere and then the South, species by species, flying over seas and continents.”
Broken Nature
The XXII Triennale di Milano, Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival, highlights the concept of restorative design and studies the state of the threads that connect humans to their natural environments––some frayed, others altogether severed. In exploring architecture and design objects and concepts at all scales and in all materials, Broken Nature celebrates design’s ability to offer powerful insight into the key issues of our age, moving beyond pious deference and inconclusive anxiety. By turning its attention to human existence and persistence, the XXII Triennale will promote the importance of creative practices in surveying our species’ bonds with the complex systems in the world, and designing reparations when necessary, through objects, concepts, and new systems. Even to those who believe that the human species is inevitably going to become extinct at some point in the (near? far?) future, design presents the means to plan a more elegant ending. It can ensure that the next dominant species will remember us with a modicum of respect: as dignified and caring, if not intelligent, beings.
Broken Nature is composed of a thematic exhibition and a number of international participations solicited through official channels. It will run from March 1 to September 1, 2019.
PRO
AGAINST