SYMBIOCEAN

SYMPOÏETIC DESIGN PRACTICES WITH/IN TROUBLED WATERS.

Reef ecologies have been transformed into ruinous spaces. Continued anthropogenic pressure on coral worlds has led to death and destruction of marine habitats. The effects of the climate crisis appear to be becoming irreversible damage not only to corals, but also to all symbiotically associated species that depend on their thriving, including the human. However, in rare cases, unlikely ecosystems have managed to establish themselves in blasted seascapes(following Tsing and Kirksey's term »blasted landscapes«¹), which, as Alexis Shotwell reminds us, »can still be spaces of hope«². They illustrate neither the fall of an »untouched paradise« nor the irreversible destructiveness of the human species alone: in their resistance to being wiped off the ecological map, despite all the devastating forces to which they were and are still exposed, they could be read as islands of hope in a largely ruinous ocean. This hope, however, is contaminated.

The »SymbiOcean« project brings together design, anthropology, and marine biology to develop a new approach to the creation of feral³, unruly, and locally situated marine habitat in collaboration with ocean dwellers, marine communities and their diverse materials, technologies, and cultural approaches. These newly emerging ecosystems, resulting from collaboration across species boundaries, could be called »queer reefs«. They act as a counter to the established norms of conservation policies that traditionally advocate for a return to a »pristine«, »prehuman« or »untouched« ecology. »Queer reefs« seek to contribute to the recently emerging field of queer ecologies⁴ by specifically addressing conservation practices and policies in marine environments in messy and compromised times. Through methods of ecological attunement⁵, co-design, and underwater fieldwork through diving, »SymbiOcean« is developing forms of submerged⁶ practice and thinking that consider convivial conservation⁷ as a new model for shaping the future of reefs and the intricately interwoven life of marine communities.

This PhD project is funded by the Swiss National Science Fund project »Interfacing the Ocean« led by Prof. Dr. Karmen Franinović and Dr. Roman Kirschner at Zurich University of the Arts, conducted together with PhD researchers Antoine Bertin and Anthea Oestreicher. The doctorate takes place within the practice-based PhD program cooperation between Zurich University of the Arts and University of Arts and Design Linz, supervised by Prof. Dr. Karmen Franinović (Design) and Dr. Karin Harrasser (Cultural Theory, University of Arts and Design Linz). As associated member, Rasa Weber has joined the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity« at Humboldt University of Berlin in 2022 and is part of its PhD research cohort.

^{1 Anna L. Tsing (2014). »Blasted Landscapes (and the Gentle Arts of Mushroom Picking)«. In: Eben Kirksey (ed.) (2014). »The Multispecies Salon«. Duke University Press. 
2 Alexis Shotwell (2016). »Against Purity. Living Ethically in Compromised Times«. University of Minnesota Press, p. 198.
3 Jack Halberstam (2020). »Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire«. Duke University Press. 
4 Greta Gaard 1997, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands & Bruce Erickson 2010, Timothy Morton 2010, Matthew Gandy 2012, Catriona Sandilands 2016.
5 Vinciane Despret 2008, Lisbeth Lipari 2014, Russell J. Duvernoy 2020, Karmen Franinović & Roman Kirschner 2021.
6 Macarena Gómez-Barris (2017). »The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives«. Duke University Press. 
7 Bram Büscher & Robert Fletcher (2019). Towards Convivial Conservation. In: Conservation & Society, Vol. 17, No. 3, p. 283-296.}

CREDITS: Siderastrea siderea coral in "coral hospital" of Blue Apple Bay, rasaweber.com. Photo: Rasa Weber.  Location: Tierra Bomba (COL), 2023.

QUEER REEFS

A QUEER ECOLOGICAL JOURNEY INTO
BLASTED SEASCAPES.

«Corals are good to queer with.»(Helmreich 2016)



Coral reefs enable chimerical, impure, and disturbed life forms to be conceived as unexpected sources of hope in catastrophic times (Stengers 2015). 

If ruins are now our gardens (Tsing 2014), we need to ask ourselves what possibilities arise from these patches that emerge as small habitable zones in often increasingly uninhabitable urbanized blasted landscapes (Tsing 2014, Shotwell 2016). While topological negotiations on land are subject to biopolitical and colonial power regimes that become visible in the distribution of territory (territory from Greek terra = soil), the organization of space in aquatic environment has often been overlooked, probably because the seascape is more difficult to access by the human eye. Port basins, former marine military zones, tourist beaches, offshore power plants and oil drilling platforms are the urban marine environments I want to turn to in order to find spaces of hope in oceans of drastically declining biodiversity. I am interested in observing zones that offer possibilities for emerging ecological alliances, especially through the recently emerging lens of queer ecologies. These ecosystems always start from a conflicted, presupposed, and compromised environment that has never been pure, and thus lend themselves to the notion of understanding aqua-tory as queer space. The queering of space in this sense speaks of «a heterogeneity of its users but is also connected with multiple structures of power that transcend binary or simplistic classifications (…)»(Gandy 2012).

The current conservation debate around the (re)construction of artificial seascapes and «prestine» coral reef habitat is in urgent need of a critical reading that focuses on three distinct concepts: namely reefs as spaces of condensation for conceptualizing «impurity» (Shotwell 2016), «monstrosities» (Haraway 1990, Preciado 2019, Halberstam 2020) and «queerness» (Gaard 1997, Mortimer-Sandilands & Erikson 2010, Halberstam 2023) as productive categories and, I conclude, provide an outlook on the reef as a figuration of an emerging «queer ecology», that holds promise for ways of convicial living and thinking otherwise.

CREDITS: Bleaching colpophylia natans coral at Blue Apple Bay. rasaweber.com. Photo: Rasa Weber.  Location: Tierra Bomba (COL), 2023.

OF OTHER REEFS

DESIGNING HABITATS IN

BLASTED SEASCAPES.

Migrating reefs, unprecedented species assemblages, neophytes, toxicities, pollutants, aquatic ruins - The future of coral reefs in the Anthropocene is likely to be different from anything we have experienced to date.

While biodesign primarily aims to explore ecological relationships in terms of new materials and products, an emerging interest in shaping the multi-layered ecological relationships of habitats for other-than-human lives is steering design practice towards terraforming or, in the case of marine environments, towards aquaforming. This paper argues for using convivial conservation practices in marine environments as a starting point for the development of a new design methodology that focuses on the design of living systems in open environments, a methodology I propose to call - Sympoïetic Design.

The classic conservation debate on coral reef restoration still treats these

ecosystems as "sick patients". However, a radically different perspective of

convivial conservation is beginning to question exclusive human control over these endangered environments. If we set aside notions of natural "purity" and adopt a much more humble and highly interconnected perspective on marine habitats, we can regard reefs as transformative, sympoïetic and blasted seascapes for a convivial future.

CREDITS: Kiki prototype of artificial reef at marine field station STARESO. rasaweber.com. Photo: Rasa Weber. Diver:Noemie Chabrier. Location: STARESO (FR), 2023.

DIE NEUE SENSIBILITÄT

(DE)

ENTWERFEN IN UND MIT ANTHROPOZENTRISCHEN UMWELTEN.

THE NEW SENSITIVITY

(ENG)


DESIGNING IN AND WITH

ANTHROPOGENIC ENVIRONMENTS.

Das Meer, die Arktis, der Wald, das Lithiumwerk. Im Zeichen elementarer Umwälzungen innerhalb unserer vom Menschen veränderten Landschaften verlassen Designer*innen die geordnete Umgebung des Designstudios und den transdisziplinären Raum des Labors. Sie gehen das Wagnis ein, im offenen System, zusammen mit Materialkreisläufen, anderen Spezies und versehrten Ökosystemen eine neue Designsprache «im Feld» zu entwickeln.

The sea, the Arctic, the forest, the lithium plant. In the face of elementary upheavals within our human-altered landscapes, designers are leaving the ordered environment of the design studio and the transdisciplinary space of the laboratory. They take the risk of developing a new design language «in the field», in an open system, together with material cycles, other species and damaged ecosystems.

CREDITS: Rasa Weber diving at Biorock reef Curaçao. rasaweber.com. Photo: Mike Duss. Diver: Rasa Weber. Location: Sun Reef, Curaçao (ANT), 2022.

ATTUNEMEMT

TO THE OCEAN

UNDERWATER METHODS

BETWEEN

DESIGN RESEARCH

AND MARINE BIOLOGY.

The experimental prototype is based on the process of mineral accretion by electrolysis (Biorock) and is designed as an artificial reef. The reef structure is located at STARESO - Station de Recherches Sous-marines et Océanographiques de Calvi, FR, and is made of conductive steel yarn, steel frames and is connected to a solar panel on land. The prototype will remain in the sea for a whole year, unless the Corsican storms decide otherwise, and will become a habitat for different types of marine life.

CREDITS: Diving into the big blue ocean of Corsica. rasaweber.com. Photo: Rasa Weber. Diver: Anja Wegner. Location: STARESO (FR), 2022.

A SYMPOIETIC OCEAN

DESIGNING WITH/IN

THE MARINE HOLOBIONT.

In the face of profound human impact on planetary systems,

the global ocean is fundamentally transforming its interactions,

flows, and ecologies. These critical changes raise

questions of other-than-human cohabitation on a blue

planet. In response, a growing branch of design discipline

is currently struggling to free itself from a production-oriented

paradigm of industrial modernity and attempts to reorganize

its methods toward interspecies collaboration

with/in environments of anthropogenic change.

In this paper, I argue for activating the evolutionary theory

of symbiogenesis and its particular relevance to a holistic

view of the ocean as holobiont in order to reinvent our

disciplinary design protocols. Following Haraway’s notion

of sympo.esis the article proposes to adopt the evolutionary

model of symbiogenesis for design. Symbiogenesis, disseminated

by biologist Lynn Margulis, based on the preliminary

work of Mereschkowsky and Kozo-Polyansky,

offers a new perspective on design as a facilitator for collaborative

forms of making and shared survival.

The coral reef, as a prototypical space for symbiotic system

relationships, serves as an experimental contact zone for

designing these interspecies encounters. Design research in

underwater environments could help us to align the design

discipline with a new conceptual framework that I propose

to call Sympoietic Design.

CREDITS: Biorock reef and symbiotic  prototype at sun reef. rasaweber.com. Photo: Pawel Siman. Location: Sun Reef Curaçao (ANT), 2022.

SYMBIO DESIGN

TOWARDS SYMPOIETIC

MATERIALS RESEARCH

IN THE OCEAN.

«We are symbionts on a symbiotic planet, and if we care to, we can find symbiosis everywhere.» (Lynn Margulis, 1999)

We face an epochal shift in relationship to the natural re- sources that shape our (urban) environment. The building industry’s common practice of categorizing unused material as waste, flies in the face of an impending raw material scarcity. The paradox of our established mode of construction lies in an increasing awareness of the urgency to find «circular» solutions for the building industry (Compare: United Nations, A Guide to Circular Cities, 2019) and a constantly decreasing durability of our newly built architectures. This accelerated mode of construction affects terrestrial and maritime ecologies a like (offshore sand mining, fracking et al.). The search for non-extractive answers implies redesigning the production of resources in regard to their multiple environmental relations.

CREDITS: The coral gardener Mike Duss with his artificial Biorock reef. rasaweber.com. Photo: Rasa Weber. Diver: Mike Duss. Location: Sun Reef Curaçao (ANT), 2022.