Events
Masterclass

Posthuman Symbioses Masterclass

A Thinking-With Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti 

Held in conjunction with Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, the host of ‘An Evening With Donna Haraway, Bruno Clarke and Rosi Braidotti’ on Thursday, 7th December, the ‘Posthuman Symbioses Masterclass’ on 8th December at BK/TU Delft focused on the urgent question of our ‘becoming-with’ environments. The Masterclass aimed at finding conceptual tools for redirecting future architecture and urban design towards a more sympoietic direction that may mitigate the increasingly complex crises in the Anthropocene.

As the posthumanist philosopher Rosi Braidotti argues, the environmental, social, and technological transformations that define the present can no longer be addressed separately by the sciences, humanities, and engineering. This disciplinary separation along divisions of nature, culture, and technology prevents the approach of these immense and irreversible problems as processes that are created, co-constituted, and co-individuated by design. The concept of sympoiesis elaborated in Donna Haraway’s well-known work critically extends autopoietic notions of self-organising systems by attending more closely to the forms of co-evolution in which things always ‘become-together-with’ other things.