Sat, 1 June 2024, 4 pm
Opening
Festival OSTEN
Sun, 2 June 2024, 3 – 6 pm
Interwoven Identities. A textile landscape of Bitterfeld-Wolfen
Laya Chirravuru, Maria Dinca
// Workshop
Alte Feuerwache Wolfen
The chemical waste from the GDR still pollutes the natural environment in and around Bitterfeld-Wolfen. At the same time, the lakeside town is now a popular local recreation area. The designers Laya Chirravuru and Maria Dinca weave the town’s different, sometimes contradictory identities into carpets and invite you to weave in personal stories.
In their workshop, Laya Chirravuru and Maria Dinca develop large-format, woven carpets that make the past and present of the region visible and tangible. They use old clothes and former products from the film and fiber factory. When woven together, they create new contemporary patterns. The textile works of Bauhaus artist Gunta Stölzl serve as inspiration. Her abstract style was the result of weaving experiments with unconventional materials, techniques and patterns. The act of collaborative weaving invites conversation – the different materials are interwoven with the personal stories of the participants. At the end, artists and workshop participants decide together how the “landscape” they have created should be used – as a tapestry with symbolic character or as a seating area that invites further dialog on the festival grounds?
No previous knowledge of weaving is required.
Concept: Laya Chirravuru, Maria Dinca and Kathrin Rutschmann
Language: German and English
Fri, 14 June 2024, 3 – 6 pm
Think like a forest. Co-Design with mycelium
Elena Maldonado
// Workshop
Alte Feuerwache Wolfen
How does nature reclaim abandoned industrial landscapes? The workshop invites participants to take a walk through the post-industrial landscape of Bitterfeld-Wolfen and take part in a practical exercise. Participants can learn from fungi and speculate on new industrial solutions.
Where once there were factories, trees and shrubs are now growing again. Designer and design researcher Elena Maldonado invites participants to think like a forest and focus on collaborative creation and co-design. The forest owes its ability to recover from industry to an underground network of fungi. The workshop emphasizes the importance of imagination and fiction in the interaction between humans and nature: By learning from nature, especially from the regenerative, natural environment in Wolfen, we can enter into an active dialog with its flora and fauna.
Language: German and English
Registration required
In collaboration with PCH Innovations.
Fri, 14 June 2024, 6 – 9 pm
Friday Group: Art + Environment
Bauhaus Museum Dessau
Sat, 15 June 2024, 3 – 4:30 pm
Securing traces. Echoes from dust
Ines Glowania, Rebekka Hehn
// Workshop
Alte Feuerwache Wolfen
Bitterfeld-Wolfen looks back on an eventful history. Economically, ecologically, socially and politically, the town has undergone structural changes that are still ongoing today. Designers Ines Glowania and Rebekka Hehn invite you to explore the post-industrial echo and press bricks from industrial dust.
Together with the participants, they collect material samples at sites of structural change in Wolfen – the legacies of the past: dust, building rubble, lint and the like. What is collected is not understood as waste from industrial production in a negative sense, but rather as a material resource from which something new can be created with regard to the future. The dust represents time and forms a reference to the places the designers deal with in their workshop. Once the fragments of the past have been harvested, the collected material is processed into small bricks. This way, each of the sites is given a new brick that symbolizes its history.
Language: German and English
Sat, 15 June 2024, 3 – 5 pm
Step Gently
Lili Carr and participants of the Master program COOP Design Research
// Walk
Meeting point: Alte Feuerwache Wolfen
Landscape architect Lili Carr and students at the Bauhaus Dessau invite the festival audience to go on a series of walks through the changing landscapes of Wolfen. Equipped with our senses and a variety of sensors – tools for noticing – we will question what shapes the soil and what relations we share with the plants and beings that inhabit it.
Since the late 17th century, the soil of Bitterfeld-Wolfen has continuously been transforming. Lignite mining and industry churned through geology, radically altering the course of streams and groundwater, and irreparably changing the composition of the soil. These changes are documented in memories, stories and physical ephemera – photographs, letters, buildings, objects. They are also archived in the present-day physicality of land and by its ecologies that have been erased, persisted, or emerged anew. The participants of the Master program COOP Design Research at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation/Hochschule Anhalt guide the audience through the changing landscapes of Wolfen to collectively find out, what stories they tell us.
In German and English
Sat, 15 June 2024, 6 – 7 pm
Compulsive Desires. On Lithium extraction and rebellious mountains
Marina Otero Verzier
// Lecture
Rathaus Bitterfeld-Wolfen, Hörsaal
In her lecture “Compulsive Desire: On Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains”, Marina Otero Verzier examines the social, mental and ecological consequences of lithium mining in northern Portugal.
Lithium is a raw material for both the so-called green energy transition and for mood stabilizers. It is used in the batteries of phones, computers and electric vehicles as much as it is used in the treatment of exhaustion, mania and depression. Lithium keeps machines running and working bodies productive; as such, it keeps the capitalist dream of endless growth alive.
The mining of lithium leaves lacerations in the landscape. One of the examples for such lacerations is Covas do Barroso, Portugal – a region with biodiversity and centuries-old culture – where lithium started in 2016. The residents of Covas are fighting back. They know that lithium mines have a long-term impact on the quality of air, water and soil. Their resistance follows that in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, the Czech Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Spain and many other regions. It transforms violence into a force for survival and a longing for life. Such resistance temporarily puts a stop to the compulsive desires of capitalism.
By and with: Marina Otero Verzier
Language: English
Duration: 60 min
Lili Carr’s contribution is supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL
