Performative online lecture: Growth towards degrowth
On 15 February at 17:00 a performative online lecture titled Growth towards degrowth will be given by the Latvian artist and urbanist Liva Dudareva, as part of IZOLYATSIA’s educational programme in Soledar. The interactive lecture will be based on the idea of degrowth (the development of cities outside growth) in (post-)industrial cities which, whilst decreasing in size or in population, are still successfully developing and, in so doing, challenge earlier conceptions of what constitutes a city’s success.
During the lecture, instruments will be presented which have been developed and used in a number of cities in the East of Ukraine by the DeGrowth Institute, an initiative founded by the duo Metasitu. The DeGrowth Institute proposes to search for collective strategies where progress occurs from the bottom up and actively engages with ideas of identity, revival and conservation.
Liva Dudareva is an artist who is deeply interested in the geological formations that comprise our quotidian life. From the crystals integrated into electronic chips and liquid crystal displays (LCDs) to the artificial gems which supposedly counteract the negative effects of 5G radiation and the ancient rock artefacts which accumulate thousands of years of natural and cultural processes. Her research practice is located between of visual art, geology and the universe. She was born in Latvia and has experience in landscape architecture and urbanism. Her works situate geological themes in a broader geopolitical landscape, in which material realia and extraction processes are examined. She founded Metasitu in 2014 alongside Eduardo Cassina: it is a collective which was devised for the research of the means by which people relate to the built environment at different times and in different disciplines. Metasitu’s work is in the main focused on the decrease in size of cities in Eastern Ukraine; this is specifically addressed through their current project DeGrowth Institute, which researches ideas for degrowth in post-industrial cities with a demographic population decline.
This project is financed by the International Aid Fund for Organisations Working in Culture and Education for 2021 by the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Goethe-Institute, and other partners: www.goethe.de/hilfsfonds