Dialogue series: Spencer Reeder meets Julia Watson

Erica Blair, Associate Director at Burning Man Projects Julia Watson, Designer, activist, academic and author Sarah Ichioka, Co-Author of Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency Chaired by Hattie Hartman, Sustainability Editor at The Architects' Journal

Designer, activist, and academic, Julia Watson is a leading expert on indigenous technologies. Her new book with Taschen, Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism is a bestseller and has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Dwell, Architectural Digest, The Washington Post, just to name a few. Julia teaches Urban Design at Harvard Graduate School of Design and Columbia University. She’s the Principal of Julia Watson, a landscape and urban design studio with a focus on indigenous design, and co-director of A Future Studio, a collective of eco-conscious designers. She has written for an array of platforms including ArchDaily, Blueprint, loARCH and Kerb, as well as co-author of A Spiritual Guide to Bali’s UNESCO World Heritage. This year she will be speaking at TED, COP 26, Venice Biennale and Dubai Expo 2020. What Design Can Do Live What Design Can Do organises annual conferences on design and innovation in different cities across the world. With a shot of positivity we facilitate unique exchanges through an international line-up of visionary speakers and interactive workshops. Each WDCD Live event is a bee hive of change makers from a multi-disciplinary background, where connections are made and a cross pollination of ideas take place. From makers to marketeers, designers to diplomats, activists to architects, and more. Learn more here: https://www.whatdesigncando.com/wdcd-live-events/

Within a mere two hundred years, the capitalist way of running the economy has revealed itself as unsustainable: it is destroying its own ecological and social foundations. Indigenous economies, on the other hand, have worked for millennia – and are increasingly being discussed as solutions for coping with climate change. Studio Bonn presents three models of global cooperation that combine sustainability and social justice. The design expert Julia Watson, author of Lo-TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism, Taschen 2021, has researched indigenous architectures all over the world. To ensure that the transfer of knowledge does not lead to one-sided exploitation, she has developed a new business model: An oral smart contract, developed with experts in indigenous law, allows companies that use indigenous knowledge to share profits with the indigenous communities that originated it via blockchain. The initiative, named The Symbiocene, is currently being presented in the exhibition Our Time on Earth at the Barbican in London The diplomat and computer scientist Youssef Nassef has coordinated resilience work in the United Nations system for 23 years, after having served as a diplomat and climate change negotiator for ten years before that. Disillusioned with the impact of the post industrial-revolution war on the biosphere, he and the new Bonn-based UN initiative Resilience Frontiers are using the knowledge of writers, film directors and data analysts to gear our attitudes, thoughts and actions towards the impending destruction of the planet. On a former palm oil plantation in Lusanga, Congo, Ced’Art Tamasala and Mathieu Kasiama and the Congolese Plantation Workers’ Art League (Cercle d’art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise, CATPC) engage with the history of the colonial exploitation of palm oil and cocoa plantations. CATPC’s chocolate sculptures have been exhibited at the SculptureCenter in New York and elsewhere. The day before the Studio Bonn event, at Art Basel, CATPC and artist Renzo Martens will sell 300 NFTs of a Diviner’s Figure carved in 1931 during the Pende uprising against Belgian colonial rule and now preserved at the Virginia Museum of Art. The proceeds will be used to buy back land and revitalise cultural traditions and sustainable agriculture. In the documentary series Plantations and Museums, Tamasala and Mathieu explore the history of the sculpture and of cultural exploitation in general. STUDIO BONN. Listening to the Future Exchange Values CONTRACTS FOR EARTH with JULIA WATSON CATPC (Ced’Art Tamasala und Mathieu Kasiama with Renzo Martens) YOUSSEF NASSEF Chair: Kolja Reichert The video is a recording of Studio Bonn from 15 June 2022.