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New European Bauhaus Rising Star Award Winner Klasse Klima invites creative reflection upon the European shortcomings regarding climate justice with the two-day virtual symposium “RE: New European Bauhaus. For a Just Design Of Climate Politics”
In 2020, the European Commission launched the New European Bauhaus (NEB) as cultural initiative to mobilize creative pracitioners, scientists, and students for the materialization of the European Green Deal (EGD). As part of a co-design phase, in 2021 it launched a series of awards to highlight initiatives that represent the NEB’s values.
In September 2021, the Berlin climate education collective Klasse Klima received the €15,000 New European Rising Stars Award in the category “Interdisciplinary Education Models” for creating transdisciplinary learning and discussion spaces on the intersetion of climate justice and creative practice.
The NEB and the EGD are projects under permanent development, as well as objects of profound criticisms coming from activists, scientists, theorists, and creative practitioners. Neither the EGD nor the NEB in their current states do acknowledge the principle of climate justice. The EGD fails to stabilize the global temperature rise below 1.5°C, risking the existence and living quality of millions. It fails to link the European green transition to the promotion of global equality and basic rights. It fails to acknowledge Europe’s historical entanglement with climate destruction and refus- es to sufficiently compensate the most affected people and regions. In these and many more regards, the EGD fails to transform European politics and the Union’s economy as rapidly and fundamentally as ethically given. These short-comings resonate in the NEB, which celebrates the historical design and architecture movement Bauhaus as its central inspiration, without acknowledging the plurality and ambivalence of this reference and in full disregard of its inegali- tarian, eurocentric, and modernist character.
The symposium “Re: New European Bauhaus. For a Just Design of Climate Politics” taking place virtually March 5-6, 2022, seeks to address these issues constructively and to claim political response-ability of the existing and potential NEB co-design community. Fostering response-ability, here, means the event wants to connect emerging architects, artists and designers, and participants from other intersecting fields, to collectively explore ways for a critical and productive, deep engagement with the NEB informed by the princi- ple of climate justice.
Inspirations will come from speakers such as Claudia Mareis (Humboldt-Universität) and Hicham Khalidi (Jan van Eyck Academie). Partners include the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, DiEM25 and European Alternatives.
The full program of panels and workshops and the registration form can be found at
forajustdesignofclimatepolitics.com
About the Initiative: Klasse Klima was founded in 2019 at the Berlin University of the Arts to establishing the urgency of the climate crisis in creative education. Starting out by organizing a student-led transdisciplinary seminar series it is still running every week. To this end, the group connects initiatives, students, researchers, practitioners that share the aim of creating, designing and thinking for climate justice over discussions and joint projects. Klasse Klima increasingly works towards a structural and broad ecological shift in architecture, art and design and their knowledge institutions. Consequently, the collective is evolving into a para-institutional, independent platform offering learning, research and experimentation spaces for transdisciplinary climate-just creative practice. “RE: New European Bauhaus. For a just design of climate politics” is the platform’s first event, gathering an audience from across Europe and beyond to share theoretical and practical knowl- edges of politicized and politicizing creative practice, and to commonly explore and realize their transformational agency within political structures.